Joseph Stenhouse

Joseph Russell Stenhouse, DSO, OBE, DSC, RD, RNR (1887–1941) was a Scottish-born seaman, Royal Navy Officer and Antarctic navigator, who commanded the expedition vessel SY Aurora during her 283-day drift in the ice while on service with the Ross Sea Party component of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914-17. After Aurora's escape from the ice he brought her safely to New Zealand, but was thereafter replaced as the vessel's commander. He later served with distinction in the Royal Navy during both World Wars.

He was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, into a prosperous shipbuilding family, and was educated in England at Barrow Grammar School. After a short spell as a junior clerk with Lloyd's Register of Shipping, he served a Merchant Officer's apprenticeship on tall ships rounding Cape Horn. He then joined the British India Steam Navigation Company before receiving a last-minute appointment as First Officer on the Aurora, which was then in Australia awaiting refit. Receiving a commission as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve on 1 August 1914, Stenhouse sailed for Australia aboard SS Ionic on 18 September.

Aurora, commanded by Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, left Hobart for Antarctica on 24 December 1914 and arrived in McMurdo Sound, with the Ross Sea Party, on 14 January 1915. The party's main mission was to lay depots across the Ross Ice Shelf for Shackleton's expected transcontinental party. When Mackintosh left to take charge of depot-laying operations, Stenhouse took over command of the ship, with the task of finding a suitable winter anchorage. He had two problems here; first, he was inexperienced in these waters; secondly he was handicapped by Shackleton's prior instruction to Mackintosh that the ship be anchored somewhere north of the Glacier Tongue, to reduce the risks of its being trapped in the frozen seas around Hut Point - the fate of Captain Scott's RRS Discovery in 1902-04. Since Discovery, no ship had attempted to winter in the Sound - Nimrod and Terra Nova had returned to New Zealand - and the number of sheltered anchorages north of the tongue was very limited. Stenhouse manoeuvred the ship for many weeks before deciding to anchor at Cape Evans, site of Scott's Last Expedition headquarters, 1910-13. On 14 March the ship was made fast and its engines were subsequently decommissioned for winter maintenance.

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