“First game of Hockey played on ice near Ship”, from The Atlantic magazine, 2013.

The Hockey Museum recently heard of hockey being played in a most unlikely location: on the sea ice in Antarctica.

We were contacted by an Antarctic history enthusiast who pointed out that the British Film Institute had recently restored footage of renowned polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-1916 expedition to Antarctic. In the DVD extras there is footage that does not appear in the main film clearly showing a few brief seconds of the expedition party playing hockey on the Weddell Sea ice!

Shackleton was involved in three expeditions to the Antarctic. On the first in 1901, led by Robert Falcon Scott, to the South Pole, Scott and Shackleton got closer to the Pole than anyone previously. But Shackleton fell seriously ill and had to return home.

In 1907 a further attempt was ended by brutal conditions, after coming within 97 miles of the Pole.

In the 1914 trans-Antarctic expedition, Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, became trapped in the ice forcing the men to leave the ship and set up camp on the floating ice. When the ship sank in 1916 the crew lived on the sea ice for months before sailing to Elephant Island, off the southern tip of Cape Horn, in three small boats.

As Elephant Island was uninhabited, far out from normal shipping lanes, Shackleton led a five-man crew in a 22-foot lifeboat to South Georgia where he trekked to a whaling station to organise a rescue effort.

In August 1916 the remaining crew members on Elephant Island were rescued. Not a single member of the 28-man team died during the nearly two years they were stranded.

In late 1921 Shackleton set off on a fourth expedition to the South Pole but on 5 January 1922 he suffered a heart attack on his ship and died. He was buried on South Georgia.

Was the hockey game in Antarctica, on Shackleton’s third expedition, the southernmost one ever played?

Mike Smith, 18 April 2017