Yet Another Plea for a Posthumous Polar Medal for Harry McNish

Background

If you have stumbled here looking for cooking tips on the legendary Cullen skink, you may be justifiably be asking who is this Harry McNish and why should we care?

The answer is even a full-time internet culinary maven must consider broader society, and occasionally ask "what's going on here".

And so it is your humble correspondent got a bit of a bee in his bonnet about an apparently small detail in a big part of our cultural heritage (said cultural heritage being a) Western b) British c) Imperialist) - the Antarctic explorations.

Without going into details (there is an Internet for that), the gist for people of a certain age and background:

• Robert Scott came very close to winning the big one, but was tragically pipped at the post by foreign opposition, then died heroically.
• Ernest Shackleton didn't get out of the qualifying group, but survived heroically.

For success-starved people, the latter has not surprisingly become the exemplar. 

Shackleton's enormous achievement has propelled him into the stratosphere occupied by the likes of Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon - men who Get Things Done.

 I Come To Praise Shackleton, Not Bury Him

As mentioned, Shackleton was pretty awesome. 

His most awesome characteristics was his ability to extract a whole greater than the sum of the parts from a group of disparate individuals.

Should we therefore discount the individuals of said team?

There is no I in team

Alchemy is the conjuring of gold from the base metals. The base metal of  Endurance was refined very nicely with the advert for the expedition. 

Very different men, for very different reasons, signed up to this advert. 

One of these was Harry McNish.

Just an old-school shipwright

McNish was the ship's carpenter. 

A carpenter these days is the guy responsible for your bedroom cabinet doors working smoothly.

Back in the day the ship's carpenter was a big deal. Ships were made of wood. Ships structure would  fail. But  a "knacky" individual with access to some wood could effect miracles - as indeed McNish did on the Endurance, if we could imagine these as a modern performance review

• Prolonged the integrity of the Endurance - job done with either a meets expectations
• Offloaded lifeboats - after questioning strategy, delivered
• Outfitting the James Caird - innovative and exemplary
• Sailing in the James Caird - pass
• Crossing South Georgia - meets expectations

No two ways about it, McNish played an important part in the success of the Endurance mission, so why was he one of the few not to get a Polar medal?

but a Bolshie one at that

Apart from his undoubted professional skills, McNish had multiple misfortunes:

• A committed socialist
• An unbending Wee Free Christian
• The oldest person in the party
• Hemorrhoids
• Being Scottish

With these characteristics he has the wherewithal to antagonise just about anyone.

The fateful insubordination

Was there a sequence of events that led to Harry McNish dying destitute sans Polar Medal? 

Your author would contend that the questioning of Shackleton's legal authority regarding a shipless expedition led to McNish's ostracism by the mere fact he dared challenge the status quo.

And so?

It behoves anyone calling themselves a socialist, a Scot, or just a Right Thinking person to recognise the unrecognised achievements of Harry McNish.
This belated recognition  requires the posthumous award of the Polar Medal to Harry McNish.