Ross Sea Party - Personnel

Personnel

To lead the Ross Sea party Shackleton chose Aeneas Mackintosh, having first attempted to persuade the Admiralty to provide him with a naval crew. Mackintosh, like Shackleton, was a former Merchant Navy officer, who had been on the Nimrod expedition until his participation was cut short by an accident that resulted in the loss of his right eye. Another Nimrod veteran, Ernest Joyce, whose Antarctic experiences had begun with Captain Scott's Discovery Expedition, was appointed to take charge of sledging and dogs. Joyce was described by Shackleton's biographer, Roland Huntford, as "a strange mixture of fraud, flamboyance and ability", but his depot-laying work during the Nimrod expedition had impressed Shackleton. Ernest Wild, a Royal Naval petty officer, was added to the party possibly through the persuasion of his brother, Frank Wild, who was travelling as Shackleton's second-in-command on Endurance.

Some of the appointments to the party were made rather hurriedly, reflecting the limited time frame that Shackleton had allowed for preliminary organisation. Joseph Stenhouse, a young officer from the British India Steam Navigation Company, was appointed as the Aurora's First Officer after travelling from Australia to London to seek an interview with Shackleton The Reverend Arnold Spencer-Smith, a Scottish Episcopal Church priest and former schoolmaster, joined as a replacement for one of the original members of the expedition who had left for active service in the First World War. Victor Hayward, a London finance clerk with a taste for adventure was recruited on the basis of his having worked on a ranch in Canada.

Although the Ross Sea party's main role was to lay supply depots, Shackleton's programme required a scientific team to carry out biological, meteorological and magnetic research in the region. The chief scientist was Alexander Stevens, a Scots geologist and former theology student. John Cope, a 21-year-old Cambridge graduate, was the team's biologist; a would-be medical student, he later became ship's surgeon. Two other scientists were appointed in Australia, the physicist Dick Richards (who signed up for a nominal wage of £1 per week) and industrial chemist Keith Jack. An Australian cousin of Spencer-Smith's, Irvine Gaze, was taken on as a general assistant.