The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2007, Blaðsíða 14

12
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 61 #1
dogs set foot, and paw, on Antarctica with
Aeneas Mackintosh as leader of the landed
party. Eight men stayed on the ship.
Unfortunately, Mackintosh drove the dogs
too hard and 20 of them died in the ice and
snow. Ernest Joyce, who was in charge of
the dogs but subordinate to Mackintosh,
could do little. Joyce later said of
Mackintosh “I have never in my experience
come across such an idiot in charge of
men!” Meanwhile, the Aurora, which was
to be their supply ship and base, was
pushed out to sea by the ice and was forced
to return to Australia. In spite of such bad
fortune, by September of 1915, they were
getting close to having all the supply depots
in place. On one of their last trips,
Mackintosh wanted to leave the dogs
behind, but Joyce believed they offered the
only hope of success. Joyce prevailed, and
it turned out that the 4 remaining dogs,
Oscar, Gunner, Towser and Con, saved the
lives of the men who made it through the
ordeal. Three men died, Mackintosh being
one of them, which left Joyce in charge.
Con, always the outsider, was killed in a
dog fight before rescue came on January 10,
1917.
Ironically, it was Shackleton aboard
the Aurora who came to save the remaining
men and dogs. Gunner was adopted by
Ernest Joyce and his wife and lived out his
life with love and security. Oscar and
Towser went to the Wellington Zoo in
New Zealand and were very popular and
admired. A draft of a poster for use as pub-
licity contains the words “See Osman, the
leading Siberian Dog of Scott’s Antarctic
Expedition, and also the Canadian Dogs of
the Shackleton Expedition”. Ernest Joyce
sent a letter to the Wellington Zoo one year
later to inquire about the dogs’ well-being.
In it he re-stated that the dogs had saved his
life in Antarctica.
Byrd’s Dogs (1933-1935)
Thirty of the 153 dogs that went with
Admiral Richard Byrd in 1933 on his
Antarctic Expedition II (BAE II) were pur-
chased from Sigurjon Isfeld of the Gimli
area. Alan Innes-Taylor was Byrd’s Chief
of Field Operations. He came to Gimli,
with his brother, Ian “Pep” Innes-Taylor.
Alan and Ian were both pioneers of
Canadian and American aviation and they
frequently visited Gimli by plane. Ian and
Sigurjon’s daughter, Aurora, fell in love
and got married. They later lived in The
Pas, where Aurora was Trapper’s Festival
Queen one year.
Byrd said of the dogs from Gimli:
“From John Isfeld at Gimli, Manitoba,
came 30 Manitoba huskies, descendants of
the dogs used by Shackleton’s second expe-
dition—magnificent animals, large-boned,
deep-chested, heavy shouldered and
strong-legged. They weighed between 80
and 100 pounds”. Oli Isfeld supplied some
of these dogs, as well. There is a picture,
signed by Byrd and assumed to be of him
and his dog team in the year 1933-1934,
when he was alone at a meteorological hut
some 100 miles into Antarctica. We can
assume at least some of the dogs were from
Gimli, given his high opinion of the Isfeld
dogs. We have no information about the
fate of the BAE II dogs, but survivors were
probably sent to Chinook Kennels in
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