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See our Adventures in Antarctica slideshow. It would have been worth noting, when we signed up for the “Nimrod Centennial Expedition” to Antarctica, that Sir Ernest Shackleton’s pole-seeking Nimrod expedition was a failure, and that venturing south under his name was tempting fate. But we were trying to do only what he had accomplished—in fact, only part of what he had accomplished—and not what he had aspired to do. We anticipated that with a hundred years of technological advancement, we would easily reach the hut he had built at the edge of the Ross Sea, meant to last one winter a century ago but still standing, testament to his high standards and to a climate hostile even to the microorganisms that cause rot. Before we launched at 4 p.m. on New Year’s Day 2008 from the same berth in Lyttelton, New Zealand, that Shackleton had used at the same hour on January 1, 1908, we were blessed in the Anglican church where Shackleton’s party had prayed, and sang the hymn they had sung, whose Cassandra refrain asks, “Oh hear us when we cry to Thee/For those in peril on the sea.” A substantial public had gathered, including descendants of Shackleton’s crew. A brass band played and Samoyeds whose forebears had pulled Shackleton’s sledges barked as the crowd waved us off, and we were escorted out to sea by the very tugboat that had pulled the Nimrod.See the World’s Strangest Museums. Promotional material had wholesale Structural Rivets for sale touted our ship as the Spirit of Enderby, and tied onto the upper deck railing of our vessel, a small banner, the sort a laundromat might use to announce its grand opening, read Spirit of Enderby. Gigantic Cyrillic letters on the hull, by contrast, proclaimed the boat as Professor Khromov, as did the lifeboats, the maps, and the equipment on board; we entered and left ports as Professor Khromov, because that was in fact the name of the ship.

Spirit of Enderby was a flight of the enthusiastic imagination of Rodney Russ, owner of Heritage Expeditions and our trip leader. In the same advance material, there had been references to a “refurbished Russian ice-class ship,” which suggests a more active intervention than the installation of industrial blue carpeting throughout a battered Soviet research vessel from 1984—but the pretend name and the primitive accommodations seemed part of the bravado of our enterprise. (A number of far more luxurious ships sail to Antarctica, but few of them are equipped to make it through the ice to reach Shackleton’s hut.