BRIDGEWATER — Although he bears one of the most famous names in the history of global exploration, Charlie Shackleton said he never talked about it much until he arrived in America four decades ago at age 23.
“On my second day in America, the pool attendant at the Quechee Club asked me, ‘Are you related to Shackleton the explorer?’ ” the Bridgewater resident, now 63, recalled this week. “That never happened back in Ireland or England, but here now probably not a day goes by when someone doesn’t ask it.”
Shackleton, who with his wife, Miranda Thomas, own Bridgewater furniture and pottery maker ShackletonThomas, recently has seen his famous surname in headlines around the world with the discovery last week of explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s sunken ship, the Endurance, 10,000 feet below the surface of the ocean on the Antarctic sea bed.
For the past week, Charlie Shackleton’s phone has been ringing and email box has been clogged with interview requests from the media asking for his reaction to the ghostly images of Endurance — near-perfectly preserved in frigid ocean waters since it sank in 1917.
Given his relatively distant relation to the famed explorer, he acknowledged part of the outreach is probably due to ready access.
“There are not that many Shackletons in America,” he said.
Shackleton said family members assumed the Endurance would never be — could never be — found, given the depths to which it had sunk. So he said looking for the first time at the photographs of Endurance, with its name still clearly visible on the ship’s stern, was “like seeing a lost grandfather walking into the room that everyone thought was long dead.”
Growing up in a Dublin suburb, where his father, David Shackleton, ran the family’s flour milling business and was renowned as a “plantsman” who cultivated one of Ireland’s most famous walled gardens, Charlie Shackleton said his famous kinfolk were rarely a topic of conversation.
“There was the family bible in the hall and next to it the two big volumes of South,” said Shackleton, referring to Ernest Shackleton’s personal history of the famed 1914-1917 expedition in which he attempted to forge the first land-crossing of the Antarctic but was forced to abandon the Endurance when it got caught and crushed in ice. “Neither of them were ever touched.”
Instead, Shackleton said, most of the history of the family has been explored by his older brother, Jonathan Shackleton, who has spent a lifetime traveling to the Antarctic — some 40 trips by last count, his brother says — leading tour groups, lecturing, producing documentaries and co-authoring a book on Ernest Shackleton and the family background. (A third brother, Arthur, is a landscape architect in Ireland.)
Although Ernest Shackleton is routinely described as a “cousin” of the current Shackleton brothers, he is more a distant kinsman, descended through a different line of Shackletons with a common ancestor, Abraham Shackleton, who was Ernest Shackleton’s great-grandfather through one line, and the great-great-grandfather of Charlie Shackleton’s father through the other line, according to genealogy database Ancentry.com.
Despite the yawning generations, however, Charlie Shackleton said that he takes a keen interest in the explorer’s life, which he admits was a bit threadbare before he was spurred by an incredulous mother-in-law-to-be who expressed surprise that her daughter’s future husband was not more familiar with his family’s roots, Shackleton related.
“She said, ‘Charlie, it’s the most stupid thing you haven’t read Alfred Lansing’s book,” Shackleton recalled, referencing to the American journalist’s authoritative 1959 history of Ernest Shackleton’s expedition and heroic survival of him and his crew.
Since then, Charlie Shackleton said he has been busy making up for his earlier deficit, including two separate trips himself to the Antarctic, a collection of “50 or 60” books on the explorer and a photographic display of his famous family members in the showroom of his furniture workshop in the Bridgewater Mill.
Once largely uninterested in Ernest Shackleton’s legacy, Charlie Shackleton has since become evangelist, showing up in classrooms to share his exploits.
On Tuesday, he spoke to the fourth grade class at Samuel Morey Elementary School in Fairlee, where be brought photographs of the expedition and a model of the James Caird, the 22.5-foot boat in which Shackleton and a handful of companions traveled 800 miles in seeking help to rescue the main party.
The brothers have even launched a line of Shackleton-branded food items based on old and new family recipes, such as “Shackleton’s ‘Legendary’ Polar Granola” — made with Vermont maple syrup — “Aunt Kitty’s Shortbread” and “Aunt Jean’s Oak Cakes,” all available at the Bridgewater Mill or online.
But not everyone automatically thinks of Ernest Shackleton when they meet his second cousin, twice removed.
Charlie Shackleton remembers the time he was visiting his son at Proctor Academy in Andover, N.H. Upon being introduced to another student’s parent, the woman exclaimed, “Oh my God! Are you related to Shackleton?”
“You mean Shackleton the explorer? Well, yes,” Shackleton said in answer to the familiar question.
“No, no, no,” Shackleton said the woman replied. “I mean Shackleton the furniture maker.”
After decades in America, Charlie Shackleton reflected with satisfaction: “Finally, I had arrived.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
