Three cases of perfectly preserved MacKinlay’s Rare Old Whisky and two cases of brandy are amongst dozens of new objects discovered by an international team working to conserve Sir Ernest Shackleton’s only Antarctic hut.

The discoveries were made during the current short Antarctic summer.

The objects were found while removing ice from under Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds for the first time since it was built in 1908.

The finds are made up of several items including:

• a woolen undershirt labeled Bertram Armytage, an Australian member of Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition 1907-09
• rubber and felt boots still lined with straw to insulate the team’s feet
• an intact dog harness
• several crates of matches,
• and three pristine crates labelled MacKinlay’s whisky and two crates of brandy.

“It was a magical feeling literally discovering history, touching things that had remained untouched for almost a hundred years” said British-based James Blake the youngest member of the conservation team working at the site who spent many days under the hut in sub zero temperatures recovering the objects.

British firm Carpenter Oak and Woodland oversaw the carpentry work and director Charley Brentnall, onsite for the last six weeks, was delighted with the new finds. “It was an unexpected bonus to the planned programme of hut conservation. As with so much of the huts’ project, the perfectly preserved mundane everyday things like boxes of matches and bottles of whisky really bring alive the ordeal of these great men,” said Mr Brentnall.
The majority of the unique artifacts have all been transported to New Zealand’s Antarctic research facility, Scott Base, where an international team of conservators led by Briton Chris Calnan from The National Trust has just arrived to spend the long Antarctic winter conserving the Shackleton hut collection.

The work is part of a project to conserve the endangered Antarctic legacy of Scott and Shackleton’s expeditions for future generations for which £3,000,000 is urgently needed to save Captain Scott’s last expedition base.

The three crates of Scotch whisky and two crates of brandy left beneath the floorboards of a hut by the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton in 1909, at the end of a failed expedition to the South Pole, were unearthed by a team from the Antarctic Heritage Trust.

Al Fastier, who led the team, said the discovery of the brandy was a surprise, according to a news release posted online by the trust. The team had expected to find just two crates of whisky buried under the hut. The trust reported that that ice had cracked some of the crates and formed inside, “which will make the job of extracting the contents very delicate.”

Richard Paterson, a master blender for Whyte & Mackay, which supplied the Shackleton expedition with 25 crates of MacKinlay’s “Rare and Old” whisky, described the unearthing of the bottles as “a gift from the heavens for whisky lovers,” since the recipe for that blend has been lost. “If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analyzed, the original blend may be able to be replicated.”

Mr. Paterson addressed the question of what the whisky might taste like in a post on his blog when the plan to dig it up was first announced, last year:

[W]hiskies back then — a harder age — were all quite heavy and peaty as that was the style. And depending on the storage conditions, it may still have that heaviness. For example, it may taste the same as it did back then if the cork has stayed in the bottle and kept it airtight.

But if the whisky is on its side, the cork may have been eroded by the whisky or air may have got in some other way — especially if the corks have been contracting and expanding with the temperature changes over the years and seasons.