The frozen continent: Soaring cost of saving history at the pole

By SIMON COLLINS

On New Year's Day 1908, British explorer Ernest Shackleton sailed from Lyttelton for the South Pole, his expedition financed by a £20,000 bank loan.

It is a measure of inflation that almost a century later, the Antarctic Heritage Trust in Christchurch wants to raise US$2.6 million ($3.9 million) to restore the hut that Shackleton's group built as a winter base at Cape Royds, 35km north-west of New Zealand's Scott Base.

Nestled in a small hollow across a pond from a windswept penguin colony, the four-roomed hut was built to house Shackleton's party of 15 for a year.

Tins of biscuits, canned food and medicine bottles are still on shelves where they were left in 1909.

Shackleton and three others got to 156km from the pole, but turned back when they realised that they could not make it there and back.

Shackleton famously told his wife: "I thought you'd rather have a live donkey than a dead lion."

Heritage Trust chief executive Nigel Watson said the restoration would be expensive because of plans to conserve the artefacts inside the hut as well as the building.

"A significant proportion of the cost is in the conservation of those artefacts in New Zealand and possibly further afield," he said. "We have things from metals to textiles to leather, books, clothing, art.

"The other factor in the cost is the Antarctic factor. Doing anything in Antarctica is extremely expensive."

The trust, chaired by Living Earth chief executive Rob Fenwick, of Auckland, aims to restore the site to its 1908-09 condition.

That will include rebuilding the makeshift stables, made from used boxes and straw bales for eight horses on one side of the hut.

All the horses eventually died, forcing Shackleton's group to man-haul their supply sled most of the way towards the pole. The boxes and bales have long since collapsed.

A 154-page conservation plan published by the trust states a goal of making 380 new boxes and 48 straw bales to restore the original structure.

A further 600 new boxes will be needed to reproduce piles of stores that Shackleton's group kept around the outside of the hut.

After it finishes Shackleton's hut, the trust plans similar work on huts built by Carsten Borchgrevink for the first Britain Antarctic expedition at Cape Adare in 1899, and by Captain Robert Falcon Scott at the current site of McMurdo Station in 1902 and at Cape Evans in 1911.

In all, it plans to raise $27 million, including capital which can be invested to provide an income for maintenance.

So far it has raised $400,000 plus $100,000 a year from New Zealand's Ministry for Culture and Heritage, one-off grants of US$100,000 ($149,000) from the J. Paul Getty Trust and £70,000 ($190,000) from the British Antarctic Territory government, and smaller sums from the British Antarctic Heritage Trust, Quark Expeditions and others.

"We are talking to the British Government about major funding for implementation of this project," Mr Watson said.

"We are also looking for more support from the international community."

The World Monument Fund in New York lists Shackleton's hut in September as one of the 100 most endangered historic sites on Earth, with the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China.