Tom Crean
Antarctic Explorer & Irish Hero

The Boy from Gortacurraun

A few kilometres up the back road from the South Pole Inn in Annascaul, County Kerry, lies Gortacurraun — the townland where Patrick and Catherine Crean raised their large family of eleven children. Tom Crean was born here on or before 16th February 1877, at a time when opportunities were hard to come by in Ireland, where the majority were still subject to hard times in the shadow of the Famine years.

To help raise a young family meant long, hard hours working the cattle and the fields just to keep them from starvation. The Crean household was no different, and fathers often called upon their sons from an early age. When Tom was twelve years old, he left the nearby Brackluin school to work the farm with his father.

In 1893, after a series of petty arguments with his father — the latest seeing him take the blame for allowing cattle to stray from their field — young Tom Crean made a momentous decision. Like many young Irishmen of his era, he decided to join the Navy. He was almost sixteen and a half years old.

Seven Years at Sea Before Antarctica

After initial training at HMS Impregnable at Devonport, Crean's first seagoing assignment took him to the Pacific Station — the Royal Navy's operational command covering the entire West Coast of the Americas, from the Arctic Circle to beyond Cape Horn. Serving first aboard HMS Wild Swan and later the flagship HMS Royal Arthur, he was present at the Blockade of Corinto, Nicaragua in April–May 1895 — an international incident that made headlines worldwide and nearly escalated into armed conflict.

This entire chapter of Crean's life — his years on the Pacific Station and the Corinto incident — has never appeared in any previous biography. It represents one of six and a half years of Naval service first documented by Tim Foley in Crean: The Extraordinary Life of an Irish Hero.

From the Pacific Station, Crean continued his Naval career with postings that took him to shore establishments in England and then to the Australian Station aboard HMS Ringarooma — a posting that would prove pivotal. It was there that a twenty-four-year-old Crean's life would take an unexpected turn.

Three Journeys to the Ice

Robert Falcon Scott was a Naval commander with big ambitions. His ship, RRS Discovery, was preparing to embark on a mission to explore the last great continent. The desertion of one sailor led directly to the recruitment of another — Tom Crean. The year was 1901.

The Solo March

Tom Crean with colleagues and Captain Scott — Terra Nova expedition

The Terra Nova expedition set sail in 1910. Of the final eight men who reached within 170 miles of the Pole after an arduous trek across Antarctica's terrain, five were chosen to make the final push. Scott disappointed his second in command Lieutenant Evans, William Lashly, and a tearful Tom Crean. As Crean waved goodbye to his colleagues, little did he know it would be the last time he would see them alive.

A separate story of great heroism had been played out prior to the trek to the journey to the South Pole. Returning from establishing stores at One Ton Depot, a three-man team which included Crean, Apsley Cherry Garrard and Henry Bowers, had became trapped overnight on an isolated ice floe surrounded by killer whales. It was Crean who seized the initiative, leaping from floe to floe and navigating his way up a frozen cliff face to safety.

However, the greatest feat of that expedition was yet to come. Lieutenant Teddy Evans had contracted scurvy during the return march, with approximately 100 miles of an 800-mile journey still to go. Despite Evans ordering his bearers to leave him, Crean and Lashly refused — and Crean said to his dying commander:

Endurance, the James Caird & South Georgia

Sir Ernest Shackleton

Shackleton, unlike Scott, came from a merchant navy background, but he had witnessed Crean's qualities on the Discovery expedition and knew of the remarkable feats he had displayed on Terra Nova. He valued Crean foremost among the crew he recruited for his attempt to traverse the Antarctic continent overland aboard Endurance.

Before joining Shackleton, Crean had also been recruited by Joseph Foster Stackhouse — a name surprisingly absent from polar histories — who was preparing a rival British Antarctic Expedition for 1914. Stackhouse's expedition was postponed, and in 1915 he met a heroic end aboard the Lusitania.

The Endurance expedition struck trouble almost immediately when the ship became lodged in the thick continental ice of the Weddell Sea. Despite the best efforts of the crew, plans had to be made to abandon ship. Their mission had become a fight for survival as the 28-man crew hauled provisions and three lifeboats across the ice — watching as Endurance, crushed by the pressure, sank to her icy grave.

After an arduous trek across shifting ice floes, an opportunity arose to man the lifeboats and head for Elephant Island. Crean skippered the smallest and most difficult to navigate of the three — the Stancombe Wills.

With little prospect of rescue from Elephant Island, Shackleton chose Crean among his crew of six for an almost impossible mission — an 800-mile open boat voyage across the notoriously perilous Southern Ocean in the adapted James Caird, heading for the whaling station at Grytviken on South Georgia.

After a sixteen-day voyage of unimaginable hardship, the James Caird reached South Georgia — but on the wrong side of the island. The only hope remaining was to cross its uncharted, mountainous interior. The task fell to Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean. In a thirty-six hour crossing of hostile glacial terrain, made without maps, the three men reached the whaling station and raised the alarm. Every man on Elephant Island was eventually rescued.

Home to Kerry — and the South Pole Inn

The last known image of Tom Crean

Crean's retirement from the Navy in 1920 was enforced after he was diagnosed with Retinitis. His pension allowed him to return to Annascaul, where he and his wife Eileen — née Herlihy, whom he had married in 1917 — ran a pub from premises he had purchased in 1916.

Tom Crean had earlier been given a publican's licence in 1917. After significant renovation — including raising the building's foundations to protect against flooding from the nearby river — the pub opened in 1929 and was named The South Pole Inn. Previous accounts have incorrectly stated the opening date as 1927. Crean confirmed the 1929 date himself in court testimony in 1930.

His friend Edgar Evans — Taff Evans — had confided in Crean during the Terra Nova expedition about his ambitions to buy a public house on his return to Wales and name it The South Pole. Evans died on the return journey from the Pole. Though undocumented, it is believed that Crean's naming of the pub was a gesture of remembrance to his great friend.

In retirement, Crean led a quiet life running the pub with Eileen while raising their three daughters. He declined all requests for interviews and left the room when visitors came seeking stories of Antarctica. His reticence was not, as some have suggested, a consequence of political vulnerability in Republican Kerry. In April 1920, his attendance at a public protest in Tralee was openly reported in the Killarney Echo, identifying him as a famous man who had been with Shackleton to the South Pole. His silence was entirely in character — a profound reluctance to be seen as boasting about achievements he regarded as simply doing his duty.

In 1938, Tom Crean passed away at the age of 61, having contracted peritonitis after being denied a life-saving appendectomy at Tralee hospital when no surgeon capable of performing the operation was on duty. He had to travel by ambulance to Cork for treatment but did not survive. His funeral was the largest Annascaul had ever seen.

He lies buried a few kilometres from the South Pole Inn, in a family tomb he built with his own hands. Across the road from the pub, a privately funded bronze statue stands in his honour. In January 2021, following an 11-year campaign led by Tim Foley and supported by over 50,000 people worldwide, it was announced that a government-funded research vessel would be named RV Tom Crean in his honour. On 6th October 2022, RV Tom Crean moored in Dingle, County Kerry — close to where he was born. A sailor, finally home.