Shackleton’s Peas
Antarctic Heritage Trust Conservator Belinda Hager discusses the treatment of canned food tins from Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds and all the left over peas!
Feature image: Working on food tins (Stu Shaw)
We’ve been working our way through lots of food tins from Shackleton’s Nimrod Hut at Cape Royds that we brought back to Scott Base to conserve this winter. It’s been striking to note how much pea soup there was, and in what quantities it has survived intact.
Captain Cookesley’s Consolidated Pea Soup (C. Tulloch/AHT)
Symington’s Prepared Pea Soup (B. Hager/AHT)
At the start of the season we worked on tins of Captain Cookesley’s Consolidated Pea Soup. When we first started working on them, we thought they were cute, because they’re very small……but like gremlins, the more there were, the less cute they became! We worked on 94 of those, but we’ve also worked on Symington’s Prepared Pea Soup tins and will soon start working on Brand’s Consolidated Pea Soup tins.
Of the 3192 tins and 12 different types of soup taken on the British Antarctic Expedition 1907 – 09, almost 45% of them were pea soup. We’ve wondered why they took so many – was it the popular flavour of the time? Or was it taken to thicken and add taste to seal and penguin meat stews? And why was there so much of the Captain Cookesley’s soup unopened? Nearly a quarter of that brand remained untouched, even by the Ross Sea Party, who were at times desperate for supplies. We’ll never know the answers, of course, but it makes for interesting work chat to speculate!
Stores list British Antarctic Expedition 1907-09 (B. Hager/AHT)
Stores list sourced from The Conservation Plan for Shackleton’s Hut at Cape Royds, developed as part of the Ross Sea Heritage Restoration Project. The Conservation Plan can be purchased by emailing info@nzaht.org
