The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [84]
Macklin, who had come to be very close to Shackleton, was shaken when he did learn. He wrote to one of Shackleton's biographers:
Of all men in the party no-one more deserved recognition than the old carpenter.… He was not only a skilled carpenter but a very knowledgeable seaman. All the work he did was first class… and his efforts to save the crushed Endurance, standing most of the time in icy water, deserved all praise.… Chippy had an unfortunate manner … and he did not hesitate to give backchat to anyone with whom he did not agree, including Shackleton, who I do not think minded very much, and particularly to Worsley for whose erratic temperament and wild actions he had no admiration at all, and did not hesitate to let him know. Worsley as a result disliked Chippy—it was mutual antipathy which led to the incident on the floe. I think Worsley may have influenced Shackleton in this respect in the later stages of the expedition when they were so much together. I would regard the withholding of the Polar Medal from McNeish as a grave injustice. I think too that the withholding of the medal from the three trawlermen was a bit hard. They were perhaps not very endearing characters but they never let the expedition down.
After coming home to England, McNish returned to sea. Throughout his diary, he had addressed affectionate asides to his “Loved One” and daughter; but this unknown woman from Cathcart, Scotland, does not seem to have remained in his life. He retired and lived with his son and his family for some years before one day announcing that he was going to New Zealand.
“And what are you thinking of, a man of your age?” his daughter-in-law remonstrated. “Don't worry, lass, I've got a job there,” said Chippy. A few days later, a horse-drawn cart arrived to take his old sea chest, and that was the last his family saw or heard of him.
McNish complained that his bones ached permanently after the James Caird journey. Ill health and drink left him unable to work, and eventually he became destitute. To the seamen of the Wellington docks, however, the carpenter of the James Caird was a hero, and the watchman turned a blind eye whenever the old man crawled into a wharf shed at night to sleep under a tarpaulin. A monthly collection was taken up by the wharf brotherhood for him and others down on their luck, and on this he maintained himself until a place was found for him, two years before his death, in Wellington's Ohiro rest home.
At the end of his life, McNish was filled with bitterness towards Shackleton—not for withholding the Polar Medal, nor for his general abandonment, but because Shackleton had killed his cat. People who knew him in his last years recall how he managed to work into every conversation the death of Mrs. Chippy. Alone, broken, with his heroism an abstract dream, Chippy McNish's thoughts turned to his one true mate, who he had boasted to a fellow seaman “had been such a special pet that she was known as Mrs. Chippy to the whole expedition.”
McNish died in 1930, and for a pauper received an uncommon funeral. His pallbearers were drawn from a Royal Navy ship, and the New Zealand Army supplied a gun carriage to carry his coffin. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Karori Cemetery, over which, in 1957, the New Zealand Antarctic Society erected a headstone. McNish left only a single possession of any value—the diary he had kept on the Endurance.
Vincent became the skipper of a trawler, and died of pneumonia in his bunk on a date unknown. A single material record of his later life is known; an unexpectedly gracious letter that he wrote to Hudson's mother, assuring her that her son— whom he had last seen utterly incapacitated by exposure and frostbite on Elephant Island—was doing very well and had never failed to pull