MRS. CHIPPY'S LAST EXPEDITION
by Caroline Alexander
(HarperPerennial) $11

THE ENDURANCE: SHACKLETON'S LEGENDARY ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION
Burke Museum, 543-5590.
Through Dec 31.

I went to the Egyptian to see a documentary called The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition. It was during SIFF and the previous movie had gone overtime, so The Endurance had to start 45 minutes late. Everyone waiting in line was, in the way that only Seattleites can be, politely, passive-aggressively pissed off. Burke volunteers, in an effort to keep the crowd entertained, conducted a Shackleton trivia contest. They asked for weird details--like the family motto, in Latin, of the guy who led the trip. They asked about marine biology. It was odd enough that these nice museum folks were trying to entertain us with National Geographic-type lore. What was truly amazing, though, was that people knew the answers.

Though Ernest Shackleton's expedition with 27 men, 69 dogs, and one cat (a handsome tabby tom named Mrs. Chippy) was a scientific failure, it was a success in that no human life was lost. It's the human part of the story that fascinates people nowadays--as several recent books, the film, and an exhibit at the Burke Museum indicate. Shackleton, who had been foiled in his attempt to be the first man to reach the South Pole years before, decided to try to be the first to cross the Pole. Almost as soon as he and his crew set out, they were trapped in ice. After their ship, the Endurance, went down, they camped for several months on the ice. When the ice began to melt, they crammed together in three small lifeboats to find land. They nearly starved, nearly froze, nearly went crazy. Though it took nearly two years for them all to be rescued, they all survived.

What the Ice Gets: Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition 1914-1916, is Seattle poet Melinda Mueller's fourth book, and the second title published by the locally based Van West & Co. Mueller's epic is divided into sections spoken by an omniscient narrator and sections in the voices of different crew members. Technically, this works wonderfully. As Gary Holthaus points out in his thoughtful introduction, the narrator speaks in iambic pentameter, and each different scientist and sailor has his own style--end-rhymed couplets, free verse, terza rima, prose poetry--according to his station or personality. Mueller renders each man as an individual, quoting copiously but seamlessly from the men's diaries, ship logs, and reminiscences.

While there are lots of oral and documentary histories of this expedition, Mueller's seems to be the first book of poetry. There's a way that poetry, with its use of stripped-down language, its staccato minimalism, its nearness to silence (all that blank, snowy whiteness in the right-hand margins...) is like an expedition to the Pole. You only take the very basic things you need; you only use the most essential word. Poetry also seems the most fitting means to address the philosophic and spiritual meanings of this trip. Here were 28 guys going as far as they could get to the ends of the Earth. It was them there at the end of the Earth, like the poet with the barest of words, doing a face-off with the Infinite. Mueller is up to the task of this epic story; she's an intelligent, witty, compassionate writer, as technically astute as Shackleton's seamen.

Which is not to say that the Shackleton story is humorless. Caroline Alexander's New York Times bestseller, The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, was not the first book she wrote about this topic. Alexander wrote Mrs. Chippy's Last Expedition: The Remarkable Journal of Shackleton's Polar-Bound Cat in l997 and was encouraged to write about the human members of this expedition later. Mrs. Chippy is a great parody of l9th-century British travel/explorer diaries. Suffice it to say that it starts with a wonderfully pompous introduction by Lord Mouser-Hunt of the Feline Royal Geographic Society extolling the heroism of Mrs. Chippy. The book devolves from there.

There is a portrait of Mrs. Chippy astride the shoulders of crew member Perce Blackborow in the current show at the Burke Museum. There are also portraits of all the other human and several canine members of the expedition. Frank Hurley, the official photographer of the expedition, dove into frozen water to retrieve his photographic plates from the sinking ship. There's something surreal about their clarity. Like the story of the whole expedition--almost too beautiful to be true.