Shackleton expedition artifacts to be donated to UK museums

LONDON (AP) — A sledge and flag used in one of explorer Ernest Shackleton's famed expeditions to the South Pole have been bought by a British government-funded body to keep the treasured artefacts in the U.K.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund, a government-funded body, said Wednesday it paid 204,000 pounds ($274,000) to help purchase the two items, used in the first of three British Antarctic expeditions led by Shackleton in the early 1900s. The artifacts will be donated to two English museums.

Earlier this year, British authorities slapped a temporary export ban on the artefacts.

The expedition was named Nimrod after the ship, which came within less than 100 miles of the South Pole for the first time in 1909. But before reaching their target, the explorers were forced to turn back, having stretched their rations to the limit.

Despite ultimately ending in failure, the expedition is considered the greatest advance to the pole in history, and set the stage for Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s successful trek just two years later.

The eleven-foot wooden sledge was one of four used to haul supplies and equipment across the Antarctic tundra. The flag, which features a red unicorn head and golden anchor, appears in many grainy photographs from the journey.

“Very little from the expedition survives,” said Jeremy Michell, senior curator at the National Maritime Museum in London’s Greenwich. ”In our Polar gallery that we’ve got, we have one item which is a rather uninspiring lamp racket from Nimrod. And you can’t really tell the same dynamic stories that you can when you’ve got a sledge."

Shackleton never reached the South Pole and died of a heart attack in 1922 off South Georgia, a British overseas territory, during a fourth Antarctic expedition.

The...