Aboard the Nimrod, from left, Frank Wild, Ernest Shackleton, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams.
by Charles McGrath
“It’s daft,” a man settled in a Glasgow pub said to me not long ago, talking about the sums that rare Scotch whiskies sometimes fetch at auction — the bottle of Dalmore 64-year-old, for example, that sold last month for nearly $200,000. “If you pay that much, you canna drink it, and wha’s the use a just lookin’ at the bottle?”
But just as there are wine geeks, there are people who get carried away over Scotch. The rituals are the same — the swirling, the sniffing, the mouth sluicing — and so is much of the vocabulary. Hint of pear, cinnamon, crushed almonds, marzipan; whiff of tobacco, leaf-smoke, moist leather. Geography matters for whisky just as much as for wine. Not only are the products of Scotland’s main whisky-making regions — Lowland, Highland, Speyside, Islay and Campbeltown — characteristically distinct, but even whiskies from distilleries just a couple of miles apart can taste vastly different. This one is sweet and grassy, with a hint of barn straw and damp car seat; that one smoky and peaty, with notes of dried moss and wet sheepdog. There are no vintages for whisky — the distiller’s aim is a product that is consistent from year to year — and once bottled, whisky doesn’t age. But before bottling, it does age in the cask, taking on flavor from the wood and the bourbon or sherry that used to be stored there. So as with wine, older is generally better, and whisky collectors regularly shell out huge sums for rare bottles.
For $160 or so, collectors in America will shortly be able to buy, nestled in a little crate made in China to look authentically Scottish, not a rarity, exactly, but a replica of one: whisky fabricated to resemble the whisky that the explorer Ernest Shackleton took with him to the Antarctic so long ago that people had forgotten all about it. In February 2007, workers trying to restore Shackleton’s hut there accidentally came across three cases of Scotch — “Rare old Highland malt whisky, blended and bottled by Chas. Mackinlay & Co.” — frozen in the permafrost. The labels on the whisky say it was intended for what Shackleton was planning to call the Endurance expedition but ended up being known as the Nimrod expedition of 1907, which was the earlier and lesser-known of his two great journeys but the more successful. He actually got to within about 100 miles of the South Pole, farther south than anyone had gone previously.
Shackleton would have loved the idea of a replica whisky. An improvident man, always in debt, he was partial to get-rich-quick schemes, including a Hungarian gold mine. By today’s standards, he was an unlikely explorer, with little scientific training or interest. He wasn’t even particularly enthralled by snow and ice. What motivated him was the lure of fame and wealth, and exploration was the best way he knew to get them. Shackleton’s great gift was his personality. He was irresistibly charming, especially to women, and for his time — he was born in 1874 — was a highly advanced adulterer, who liked sharing his girlfriends with their husbands. Men adored him, too, in part because he ignored social hierarchy and treated everyone the same. He was an instinctive, natural leader who somehow inspired others to share impossible hardships with him.
The whole Nimrod expedition was almost comically ill equipped, partly because it was underfinanced but also because of Shackleton’s stubbornness. He believed in doing things the hard way — in manly, British fashion. Norwegian explorers like Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen had already demonstrated that the best way to get around in the polar regions was to use cross-country skis and to have sled dogs pull the supplies. Shackleton had skis, but neither he nor anyone on his team could be bothered to really learn how to use them. Robert Scott, whose 1901 Discovery expedition included Shackleton, detested dogs, because they had the ungentlemanly habit of eating their own excrement, and Shackleton seems to have inherited the prejudice. For the Nimrod expedition, he took along Manchurian ponies, who sank in the snow up to their bellies and proved more useful as food than as transport, and a motorcar, which repeatedly became stuck in the drifts. For most of the journey, he and his men pulled their own sledges, as Scott’s team had, sometimes trudging through waist-deep snow.
There was no fresh fruit or vegetables, but in all there were 25 cases of whisky — for warmth and a little perk-up, presumably — along with 12 of brandy and 6 of port. They were a hard-drinking crowd. The excellent and helpful “Shackleton,” by Roland Huntford, describes how at a midwinter Christmas party in June 1908, the men wore paper hats and funny noses; Alistair Mackay, the second surgeon, passed out after drinking two-thirds of a bottle of whisky; another of the team, Frank Wild, got moody and tried to pick a fight, as he tended to do. Shackleton himself liked to pull a cork, and heavy drinking and smoking may account for his death of a heart attack at age 47.
Why was the whisky found under the hut and not inside with the other rations? One theory is that Shackleton himself put it there in the fall of 1908, before setting off for the pole, in anticipation of a victory celebration when he returned. But the fact that one case was found pried open, with a bottle missing, suggests that the whisky there may have been someone’s secret stash. Wild, who was known to have a drinking problem, is a possible candidate.
Whisky lovers also like to imagine that the occasional bracing, restorative tot helped Shackleton and his three companions — Wild, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams — withstand the hardship of their 1,700-mile trek south and back. On Christmas Day, we know, they celebrated with crème de menthe. It’s unlikely, though, especially on the return leg, when exhausted and malnourished and racing to get back before the Nimrod left, that they would have wanted the burden of whisky bottles. What really got them through was cocaine — in the form of pills called Forced March, which at one point Marshall fed the group every hour or so.
Read more:
