Novel to be returned to Antarctic expedition hut 60 years after being taken

Thursday, 28 November 2024

From left, Daniel Bornstein, Calum Turner and Louise Piggin play on a Hagglund ahead of their trip to the southern continent early next year.

International speaker Jake Bailey, a museum conservator and a sound designer are among a group of people who will undertake a bucket-list trip to Antarctica early next year.

They are among the seven New Zealanders and one Australian selected from hundreds of applicants to join the Antarctic Heritage Trust’s expedition to the Sub-Antarctic Islands and the Ross Sea.

The group will also return an artefact to Scott’s Discovery Hut at McMurdo Station.

Jake Bailey, pictured in 2017, is among a group of young people chosen for the inspiring journey.

It is the classic adventure novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, also well known as the author of the Three Musketeers books.

It was found in Discovery Hut in the early 1960s and shows every sign of being well read, said trust spokesperson Anna Clare.

Its cover and some pages are missing, and it is covered in sooty fingerprints and smells strongly of the seal blubber that fuelled stoves and lamps used by the explorers of the heroic era of Antarctic exploration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Records show it was brought to New Zealand with a batch of other books and papers, which were then lost.

The Alexandre Dumas novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, that the Antarctic Heritage Trust will return to Discovery Hut in early 2025.

The Dumas novel given to a student as a school prize in 1965. That person anonymously donated it to the trust.

The trust returns artefacts to Antarctica because they “create an incredible sense of place” inside the huts, Clare said.

Inside Scott’s Discovery Hut, which is preserved as it was when he stayed there.

“You walk into these cultural heritage sites and it's almost as if the explorers had just left and shut the door. You gain so much knowledge about how they lived, how they worked, the conditions that they endured by having those artefacts in place,” she said.

Louise Piggin, 26, is a conservation technician at Canterbury Museum and studying for a master’s degree in museum studies, focusing on hazardous collections.

A more conventional photo of Louise Piggin, Daniel Bornstein and Calum Turner at the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch.

She said she had only experienced “lab bench conservation”, and was excited to learn about the much different “extreme climate heritage conservation“ that the trust undertakes on the Ice.

Jake Bailey - a high school cancer survivor, best-selling author and motivational speaker - is now 27. He said: “The resilience of those first explorers is pretty extraordinary and something I’m keen to learn more about by experiencing such a desolate, harsh, and isolated environment first-hand and seeing how they survived”.

He hopes to return as a passionate advocate and ambassador for the trust and Antarctica.

Sound designer, audio recordist and “aspiring creative polymath” Calum Turner, 28, plans to make podcasts during the month-long trip and post them to the internet on his return.

The trip would be an “incredible opportunity”, said Australian Daniel Bornstein, 32.

The young people, all between the ages of 18 and 35, will sail on a Heritage Expeditions ship on a 28-day return voyage.

The trust, which specialises in heritage on the Ice, has launched a virtual reality “experience” of Discovery Hut, which allows viewers to visit the hut without travelling south. More VR projects are planned.

The trust would love to locate the other books and papers that were lost in the 1960s, Clare said.