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Irish Times Three crates of Scotch whisky and two crates of brandy buried under Antarctic ice for more than 100 years have been recovered by a heritage team restoring Irish born explorer Ernest Shackleton's hut. 
New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust team leader Al Fastier says he believes some bottles, abandoned by Shackleton at Cape Royds when he was forced to abort his Nimrod expedition to the South Pole in 1909, are still intact.The whisky was made by MacKinlay & Co and drinks group Whyte & Mackay has asked for a sample to carry out tests with a view to possibly re-launching the defunct brand. Mr Fastier said restoration workers found the crates under the hut's floorboards in 2006, but they were too deeply embedded in ice to be dislodged. It was originally thought the haul consisted only of three crates of Scotch. "The unexpected find of the brandy crates - one labelled Chas MacKinlay & Co and the other labelled The Hunter Valley Distillery Limited Allandale - is a real bonus," Mr Fastier said. Ice has cracked some of the bottles, but the restorers are confident the five crates contain intact bottles "given liquid can be heard when the crates are moved". "The smell of whisky in the surrounding ice before excavation commenced also indicated full bottles of spirits were inside, albeit that one or more might have broken," he added. Mr Fastier said ice had cracked some of the crates and formed inside them. This would make extracting the contents delicate, but the trust would decide how to do so in coming weeks. Richard Paterson, master blender at Whyte & Mackay, whose company supplied the MacKinlay's whisky for Shackleton, described the find as "a gift from the heavens" for whisky lovers. "If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analysed, the original blend may be able to be replicated. Given the original recipe no longer exists, this may open a door into history," he said. Shackleton's Nimrod expedition had travelled over 1,600 kilometres across the Antarctic wilderness, run out of rations and suffered a series of blizzards before being forced to retreat just 160 kilometres from its target. "I thought, dear, that you would rather have a live ass than a dead lion," Shackleton later wrote to his wife Emily. No lives were lost, vindicating Shackleton's decision to turn back from the pole, which was eventually first reached in 1911 by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. It was the second time Shackleton had attempted to reach the South Pole. He first tried with British explorer Robert Scott on his ill-fated Discovery expedition in 1902 which ended some 770 kilometres short of its goal. The excavation of the whisky follows the discovery last month of two blocks of butter in an Antarctic hut used by Scott on his doomed 1910-12 expedition. The butter had been stored in stables attached to the expedition hut at Cape Evans in Antarctica.
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