Once you notice it then it almost becomes comical. This man is just everywhere.

The stories of Antarctic exploration, from the so-called ‘Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration’, are largely dominated by the Big Three: Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen. The rivalries of the era, the story of the Scott/Amundsen race and subsequent tragedy, and the epic that is Shackleton’s Endurance fight for survival have long coloured our understanding of this era. They have also long overshadowed all those other explorers who came before and followed after.

This narrative dominance has even relegated the stories of those travelling alongside them to the margins of history. However, pour through the pages of their accounts and those hidden stories come to life. One of these is the life of a man who is held in the highest regard by them all. He is the recipient of three Polar medals for his time on the ice and additionally, one Albert Medal for his bravery. He spent more time in Antarctica than either Scott or Shackleton and, almost like a historical time traveller, keeps on popping up in all of the pivotal moments of all the famous stories.

This is the story of the incredible Irishman, Tom Crean.

If you don’t know much about Tom Crean, it may be because he was a modest man born from modest circumstances. Born in rural Ireland, he left school at 12 to help out on the family farm. He later joined the Royal Navy at age 16, as the story goes, after an argument with his father. He was soon whisked off around the world, serving on Navy vessels in Canada, and South America and then later based out of Sydney. Eight years into his Navy career and after slow and steady progression, Crean’s ship the Ringarooma was sent to New Zealand to assist in the departure of the first British expedition to Antarctica. This was the Discovery Expedition, led by Sir Robert Falcon Scott.

It’s always amazing how small moments create ripples in time that have effects long beyond their instance. As the Discovery left New Zealand bound for Antarctica one seaman fell to his death from the top rigging. Another had deserted the ship after striking an officer, and so now this grand and highly publicised Antarctic expedition was short two men. The timeline of this is a little subjective, but we do know that Scott asked the captain of the Ringarooma for some volunteers and Crean quickly put his hand up. Easygoing but tough as nails, he was within days headed to Antarctica as part of the expedition. It was a moment in time that changed the trajectory of his life.

The Discovery Expedition was the first major British Antarctic expedition in over 60 years and was also the first to try and reach the South Pole. Whilst down in the ice, only 7 out of the entire 48-man crew logged more time in the man-hauling sledge harness than Crean. This includes both Shackleton, Scott and Edward Wilson who went for the Pole achievement. Witty and with an even temperament, Crean was chosen to be part of the team laying depots of stores for the eventual Pole push, at one point briefly holding the record for the ‘furthest south’ until Scott and Shackleton eventually overtook it. This work is hard effort, man-hauling heavy sleds through terrible conditions. Crean eventually made three sledging trips across the great ice barrier as part of the expedition, all into unknown land.

After a second winter trapped in the ice, the Discovery expedition finally ended and Crean went back to his naval duties, the recipient of a promotion and a Polar Medal. Scott was so impressed by his former expedition companion that he asked Crean to join him on the ship he captained. And so, for over five years Crean joined Scott around various vessels in the Royal Navy. Crean was actually with Scott when they both heard of Shackleton’s almost successful Pole attempt with the Nimrod expedition, at the time a new record for furthest south. Scott turned to Crean and said, “I think we’d better have a shot next.”

And so they did, on the infamous Terra Nova expedition. It is on this trip that Tom Crean continued to build his legend. One of the few on the expedition with previous polar experience, he was tasked with helping to establish One Ton Depot which would supply the Polar team on their trip back to camp. On their way back to camp with two others they were camping on the sea ice when the ice suddenly broke up. Separated from their sledges containing their supplies and also from the land, they were in severe danger of drifting off to sea or disappearing into the water. To make matters worse, orca were nosing around their ice floe. Crean volunteered to get help and remarkably jumped from moving ice floe to moving ice floe, avoiding the orca and the shifting ice pads. After what seemed like an eternity, watched nervously by his shipmates, he made his way across the broken chunks of sea ice and then scaled a cliff face to go and get help. All three men made it back to safety.

Not long afterwards Scott chose Crean to be part of the team to head south for the Pole. The candidates hadn’t been chosen for the final push for the pole, and so each time the supplies dwindled and Scott sent men back to base the chances of being chosen increased. Finally, after 1,100km of travelling across the ice and almost two months of biting cold, Scott chose his final candidates for the last leg. Crean wasn’t part of the team, reportedly weeping with disappointment. Many historians and biographers have long stated that it is perplexing that Crean wasn’t one of the chosen five, as he was one of the few team members still in good condition and he had also avoided injury. But, many argue that there is also a secondary motive from Scott. Crean was known as one of the strongest team members and Scott knew that he stood a good chance of making it back to camp. He needed someone to be able to make the journey and ensure that help came for Scott and his team. If that last return party failed, Scott and his team surely would too.

As Scott and his team headed for the final push for the pole, they couldn’t have known that Amundsen had beaten them to it. And as Crean waved goodbye to Scott, he couldn’t have known that this was the last time he would ever see him alive.

With heavy hearts, Crean turned around and headed for base camp with William Lashly and Edward Evans. Almost by a Scott premonition, it was an amazing thing that Crean was there. Evans wasn’t in a good way and on the return journey obtained snow blindness and then later serious effects of scurvy. Blind, with swollen limbs and passing blood, he became a passenger on a sled dragged by Crean and Lashly. Day after agonising day they made their way north to One Ton Depot, then onwards to the subsequent depots. At Corner Camp, without any food and still 56km away from the base camp, the team had made it as far as they could go. Starving and exhausted, they had hit their limits. To make matters worse, a blizzard was coming in. It would later prove to be a similar situation to that which doomed Scott. But Crean was built differently. Leaving his tent and survival equipment behind and armed only with three biscuits and a minuscule amount of chocolate, Crean set out to get help.

Alone.

In the middle of Antarctica.

He walked non-stop for 18 hours, across one of the most brutal landscapes on earth, for 56km. Arriving at the base camp on Hut Point he notified the team of the location of the two men and then immediately collapsed. These two men would later be rescued. It remains one of the most incredible single acts of heroism in Antarctic history. It was for this action, and for carrying Evans home, that he later received from the King the Albert Medal for ‘conspicuous bravery’.

Recuperating back at camp, it wasn’t long before winter arrived and the crew realised that Scott and the polar team must have perished on their journey. At the same time, another team from the expedition had also gone missing over the winter. The mood of those left back at camp was low. But, as crew member Frank Debenham put it, “in the winter it was once again Crean who was the mainstay for cheerfulness in the now depleted mess deck part of the hut.” When summer arrived he was part of the 11-man search team that later found the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers, achingly so close to salvation.

Crean simply writes, in classic understated fashion, that he “had lost a good friend.”

He arrived home to awards and promotions but with sadness at his loss. He must have felt he had unfinished business as only six months later Crean was asked to join an expedition exploring the coastline of Antarctica, led by a good friend of Scott. When this was postponed however another polar suitor swept in: Sir Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton had travelled with Crean and also had heard of his exploits on the Terra Nova expedition, and he both highly liked and respected him. He was, in Shackleton’s own words, “trumps.” He was made a second officer on the trip and put in charge of a wide variety of roles, but Crean eventually took charge of the dog-handling teams. It is this image you see often amongst photos of Crean.

The story of the Endurance saga and their epic struggle for survival is already well known. Every step of the way, alongside Shackleton and Worsley, Crean was there. After the Endurance sank and they tried to reach Elephant Island, Crean effectively took command over one of the three lifeboats after the navigator suffered from stress and nerves. Once the crew had made it to Elephant Island, the almost suicidal attempt to try and make it to South Georgia to get help was conceived. Frank Wild, the leader of the crew remaining behind on Elephant Island wanted Crean to stay with them, mostly because of his capability and dependability. Shackleton initially agreed, but later changed his mind when Crean asked to join the attempt for South Georgia. Heading off in the lifeboat into the wild seas of the Southern Ocean, with the risk of death looming overhead, Crean remained the same man. Under brutal freezing weather, as the team huddled for survival and warmth under cover, Crean used his time manning the tiller to attempt to sing. He wasn’t a great singer, but he was a positive force of energy. As Shackleton put it, “He always sang when he was steering, and nobody ever discovered what the song was ... but somehow it was cheerful”.

Miraculously arriving on South Georgia, the crew knew that they had landed on the wrong side of the island and an extremely risky trek across the uncharted crevasse filled glaciers was their only option for survival.

The three men who made that trek? Shackleton, the captain/navigator Worsley and, of course, Tom Crean.

They walked 48km, over 36 straight hours, across treacherous landscapes. At one stage they decided to make themselves into human toboggans and rocketed uncontrollably down a mountainside, unable to see what was ahead and if they faced heading off a cliff face. Unbelievably this was the second time Crean managed to survive such a thing, having done something similar on the way back from the South Pole to get Evans to safety faster. Amazingly they made it to civilisation and Crean was there for each of the four attempts it took to rescue the men still stuck on Elephant Island. He took one lifeboat, with Shackleton taking the other, all the way to shore to pick up the cheering men.

The Endurance trip marked the end of the polar adventures of Tom Crean. Back in the navy, and with a second daughter just arrived, he turned down Shackleton’s offer of another expedition. Around the same time he had a fall whilst on Navy duties that damaged his vision and he was retired on medical grounds. Back home in Ireland in County Kerry, he opened a small pub called the South Pole Inn and settled down with his family.

There are a few reasons that Crean remains relatively unknown. One is that the leaders of these expeditions loom large over the stories, each inevitably gaining a tragic end when they die on adventures. Also, unlike the showman Shackleton or the other writers who published books about these expeditions, Crean was an extremely humble and modest man. There are no records of him giving interviews and he didn’t keep extensive diaries of his trips. When he arrived home to Ireland he put his medals away and, except for the name of the pub, never really mentioned it much again. There may have also been political reasons for this. At the time County Kerry was a centre of the Independence movement and political violence was ever present. Crean’s pub was even ransacked after they found a picture of him in a Royal Navy uniform, but they left him and his family alone.

Not much is known of the rest of his life. For the most part, he simply lived out his life quietly with his family until his passing at age 61.

Crean was largely forgotten until late in the 20th century when he slowly began to become a hero in Ireland. His modesty, bravery, loyalty and cheerfulness seemed to slowly shine through as other heroes' stories began to tarnish. He received a statue across from his pub in 2003, was the subject of a one-man play in 2006 and had a few biographies written about him in the 2010s. The momentum seems to be continuing. In 2021 the Irish government announced that a new research vessel would be named the RV Tom Crean. A children’s book about him in 2024 won a few major awards, and it seems that finally, the hidden hero of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration is getting his dues.

It’s hard to imagine how Crean would react to this groundswell of admiration. I’d imagine he’d smile his cheerful smile, hum an off-key song to himself and put his head down, back to work.

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