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Top o’ the world

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

And it expressed wonder as to how the Irish climbers had reached the top without the use of scaffolding, and how they had managed the feat at all wearing Wellington boots.
Quite apart from the significance of the Irish expedition’s ultimate success — the team scaled the infamous Mallory-Irvine ridge on the mountain’s north, or Tibetan, face — the newspaper report was actually progress of another sort. At least the Irishness of the climbers had been acknowledged.
Dubliner Frank Nugent was a lead member of the successful Irish Everest team. He was one of two climbers chosen to make the summit attempt, the other being Belfast architect Dawson Stelfox.
Nugent was forced to turn back just a few hundred feet from the summit because of oxygen equipment problems. Stelfox went on alone and secured his place in mountaineering lore.
In the years since the Everest triumph, Nugent has been delving into the lore and records of other expeditions to remote and cold places. His research has been quite specific in nature. He has been exploring and highlighting anew the Irishness of some of the great names of the classic age of polar exploration.
The role of Irishmen in exploring the vast polar regions that crown both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres has been documented to varying degrees. But their efforts were invariably set in a British context. This was not surprising given that many of them were in the service of the crown, often as officers or enlisted men in the Royal Navy.
In recent years, the British stamp on the lives of these men has eased. This has been most evident in regard to Kildare’s Ernest Shackleton, who stands as tall in the annals of Antarctic exploration as anyone, Amundsen, Ross and Scott included.
But there were other Irishmen who breached the most northerly and southerly lines of latitude in the years before Shackleton’s name was written deep into the history books, mostly British. One of them was the Royal Navy captain Edward Bransfield. Born in Midleton, Co. Cork, in 1785, Bransfield is generally accepted as being one of the first, if not the actual first, European to lay eyes on the Antarctic mainland.
The Irish twist to these chilliest of tales is most evident in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in the saga that evolved during the 18th and 19th century as explorers sought to find a way through the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
“Reading about the exploration of the Northwest Passage, I was flabbergasted at the extent of Irish involvement,” Nugent said.
This was the spur for Nugent, an explorer and adventurer in his own right, to reach into the past, to elaborate and expand, if not fully correct, the historical record. The result is book, “Seek The Frozen Lands, Irish Polar Explorers 1740-1922.”
The book offers readers an entirely new take on an A-list of polar pioneers who were Irish, but who have been lost to Ireland’s own historical record.
“There were no references to these Irish explorers in any of my history or geography books at school,” said Nugent, whose schooldays spanned the 1950s and ’60s. “It was an aspect of Irish life that nobody knew about. Most of these men undertook their polar journeys in the service of the crown and were lost in the selective memories of Irish history writers of the 20th century.”
Nugent believes that the retelling of stories so long cast in stone is a reason for belated, but deserved, national pride. His book begins with Arthur Dobbs, an Antrim man described by Nugent as the first Irishman to make a significant contribution to Artic exploration. Dobbs initiated two expeditions in the 1740s in search of the Northwest Passage, the fabled seaway that Henry Hudson once believed started at the mouth of the great American river that today bears his name.
The lure of the passage to Irish sailors was little surprise given Ireland’s geographic location.
As the British navy increasingly probed the Arctic seas abutting northern Canada in the 19th century, the participation of a significant number of Irishmen in the enterprise was inevitable, not least because the manpower of the Royal Navy so heavily depended on Irish hands, both voluntary and pressed.
The ill-fated probe led by Sir John Franklin, 100 years after Arthur Dobbs, provided the stage for a fleet of rescue ships, none successful as Franklin and those under his command had all perished.
The leading rescue ships were captained by Irishmen, including Robert McClure from Wexford, Henry Kellet from Tipperary, and Leopold McClintock from Dundalk, Co. Louth. It was McClure who first found an entrance to the Northwest Passage from the Pacific side and a glance at a detailed map reveals just how Irish sailing skills, and not a bit of luck, helped to eventually secure the dream of centuries (the passage was first fully navigated by the Swede Nils Nordenskold in 1879).
Today, the treacherous stretch of island-dotted and often icebound water between Baffin Bay and the Beaufort Sea carries names such as McClure Strait, Cape Kellet and Cape McClintock. There is even an dot of frozen tundra somewhat perversely named “Emerald Isle.”

Budding climber
Frank Nugent was born in 1949 in a dot of Dublin called Arbour Hill Army Barracks. The son of a military policeman, Nugent spent his early years surrounded by soldiers. All that marching was to get into his blood.
Though he was a city kid, he early on discovered the joys of the Irish countryside, first by way of the Boy Scouts, and later as a weekend hill walker.
“The great thing about Dublin is that you have the Wicklow Mountains on your doorstep,” said Nugent.
But Wicklow will only take a budding climber so far. Nugent graduated during the 1960s to the mountains of Kerry and Ireland’s Atlantic coast. From there it was on to Wales, Scotland and the Alps. Before he was 20, he had climbed Mt. Blanc with some Irish friends, though without a guide.
“We were into self-sufficiency but we were very thorough,” Nugent said of those early years.
Inevitably, the Himalayas beckoned. Nugent was by now a member of the small but dedicated Irish Mountaineering Club. During the 1980s he whetted his appetite with peaks such as Changtse before a first attempt at an 8,000-meter monster in 1991.
“I knew this was the place for me,” Nugent said of the world’s highest mountain chain.
In 1991, Nugent helped lead an eight-man Irish team in an effort to climb Manaslu, a mountain in Nepal that rises to 26,760 feet.
“The weather was awful, but we learned a lot,” Nugent said. “We concentrated on team building and it turned out to be our start for Everest.”
The ’91 Manaslu team included Mike Barry, a Tralee native who in January became the first Irishman to trek to the South Pole.
It was fitting perhaps that Barry hailed from Kerry given the county’s unique place in the annals of Antarctic exploration. That place was provided by the redoubtable Tom Crean, veteran of two Scott expeditions and Shackleton’s right-hand man on the Endurance expedition, arguably the greatest tale of polar survival.
Nugent’s book deals in detail with the exploits of Shackleton and Crean. But Nugent has more than just the distant writer’s appreciation of what the Endurance crew went through during the ship’s 1914-16 voyage.
Shackleton’s expedition contained numerous dramatic scenes, but perhaps the most extraordinary was the voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia in an open boat, the James Caird, in the southern fall of 1916. The James Caird epic ultimately led to the rescue of the entire Endurance crew.
Six men, including Shackleton, crewed the boat across 800 miles of freezing and storm-tossed ocean. Three of them were Irish, Shackleton himself, Crean from Anascaul, and Timothy McCarthy from Kinsale, Co. Cork.
In her account of the ’91 Everest climb, “Everest Calling,” Irish journalist and author Lorna Siggins describes Frank Nugent thus: “He was an enthusiast –someone who seemed to get as much a kick out of paddling a canoe in the Liffey Descent or running a marathon. His genial nature belied his single-minded determination.”
It is not surprising then that Nugent — whose day job is with the Irish government job-training agency F

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