Tom Crean
Tom Crean was a gigantic Irish farmboy that was built like a concrete machine gun bunker, and whose primary talents generally involved his ability to drink, fight, and carry insanely heavy objects over ridiculously long distances without complaining too much about it. He enlisted in the Royal Navy at the age of 15 as a "Boy, Second Class", served 27 years in some of the most brutal environments on the planet, performed heroic and unbelievable feats of human strength and endurance, survived weeks and months in some of the most ferocious, unforgiving environments on Earth, received a chest full of medals for heroism, exploration, and scientific discovery, and participated in nearly every major expedition from the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
Then he came home and never talked about any of it.
He's basically everyone's Badass Grandpa who went out into the world with nothing but whatever bullshit he had in his pockets, did some Man Shit with his life, and then came home, met a nice girl, and never talked about any of the insane things he'd done with his life.
he also liked puppies.
Tom Crean was born July 20, 1877, on a tiny hilltop village in County Kerry, Ireland. He was one of ten kids who lived on a little farm out there in the middle of nowhere, went to school just long enough to not be illiterate, and then decided, fuck this, I'm getting the hell out of this place as fast as I can. He joined the British Royal Navy in 1893 even though he was only fifteen years old (he lied about his age, back when you could still mostly get away with that), and set sail on the high seas in search of adventure and excitement. His initial rank was "Boy, Second Class," which is probably one of my favorite Naval ratings ever, and quickly made a name for himself for being a tough as nails, no bullshit Paddy who would drink you under the table, beat your ass in a fistfight, and then take puffs from his dope-ass pipe while you were passed out on the floor questioning your value as a human. He also possessed freakish super-strength that allowed him to drag around shit so heavy that most of the other guys on his boat couldn't even move it, and, it turns out, there were a lot of uses for that in the Royal Navy in the late 1890s.
After eight years of getting promoted through the ranks for badassitude and then busted back down again for rowdiness, Crean was approached by one of his officers about undertaking an incredibly dangerous and unprecedented adventure to explore the farthest reaches of the world – and one of the only places left on earth that had yet to be visited by Man.
That Royal Navy officer was Robert Falcon Scott, and the mission was to traverse the frozen glacial wastes of Antarctica to become the first humans at the South Pole.
Crean and his boys dragging a sledge.
Crean set sail as an Able Seaman aboard Scott's Discovery expedition in December of 1901. Sailing, marching, and sledding across Antarctica at a time when the most high-tech cold weather gear on the market was to just knife a bear to death and then wear its skin as a coat, Crean and the heroic explorers of the Discovery dragged food, supplies, equipment, and other necessities across mile after mile of trackless white glacier to set up emergency depots along their path. Their ship, Discovery, sailed as far as it could go, but then became stuck in the ice – something the explorers had more or less expected, but not a situation that they expected would be a problem for the next two fucking years. Crean and the other crewmen tried to crack the ship free from the ice, but, while doing this operation, Tom Crean fell into the ice and was completely submerged in literally the coldest water on Earth. His friends dragged him out, dripping with water that turned to icicles basically immediately, and then basically lost their shit when the big Irishman just went right back to work soaking wet, hammering at the ice with an axe trying to chip the ship free. (Not long after this, he fell into the water a second time, and had the exact same reaction).
Scott, Crean, and Discovery ended up being locked in the ice from February 1902 until February of 1904 – two long, cold years. During his two years on the ice, Crean used the time to set up supply depots along the way to the South Pole that could be used by future expeditions attempting to make a push for the pole. Along the way, he and three other guys ended up passing the furthest south that any human had ever traveled… and then he beat his record later that same week.
The Discovery mission had been brutal and excruciating, but Robert Falcon Scott loved Tom Crean's strength, work ethic, and the fact that he was always in a pretty good mood no matter how shitty the world was around him, and, at every Royal Navy ship posting Scott had after this, he requested Crean on his crew. Then, when it was time to actually return to Antarctica and push for the pole in 1911, Scott naturally hired Crean on as a Petty Officer for the mission.
The mission was named Terra Nova – New World – and it's aim was nothing short of becoming the first humans to set foot on the South Pole.
Crean at the helm.
The mission was dangerous to the extreme. At one point, the ice split apart where Crean was camping, and he woke up to find that he and a few other crewmen were on an ice floe that was drifting away from the rest of the team – he immediately ran out, jumped across floating chunks of ice over freezing-cold water in sub-zero temperatures and high winds, and basically Super Mario World'ed his way over the Ice Level to get help. Not long after that, Scott wrote how impressed he was that Crean wouldn't hesitate to drag sledges and supplies even through neck-deep water – which, honestly, is not a great idea when your cold weather kit is just fur, cotton, and leather – but Crean didn't give a rodent's scrotum. He was going to do Man Shit, and this dude literally dragged a fucking gigantic wooden rowboat to withing 150 miles of the South Pole at a time when Gore-Tek sounded like an alien language and the zipper hadn't been invented yet.
Crean and Scott got to within striking distance of the Pole, but Crean was heartbroken when Scott didn't choose him to be part of the party that would make the final push. Instead, Scott went off with two other men – and they were never heard from again.
Tom Crean and two other guys waited behind as long as they could, but it soon became evident that something was very, very wrong. They waited as long as their supplies would allow them, but then, sadly, they turned back to get help.
And that's when things got really bad.
Not long after heading the 730-mile journey back towards the coast, Lieutenant Teddy Evans developed an extreme case of snowblindness, scurvy, and started pissing blood. He was going to die if they didn't get him out of there.
Tom Crean fucking strapped that dude to a sledge and dragged his ass 700 miles through the glacial desolation of Antarctica to get that guy out of there. When the sledge hit a particularly-steep decline in the terrain, he rode the sledge down like a bobsled, with his friend still attached, and Crean later reckoned that they probably broke 60 miles an hour during the slide.
Then, somehow, it got worse.
Evans collapsed, and couldn't go any further.
So Crean went on alone to get help.
35 miles, on foot, in sub-zero Antarctica, with only a chocolate bar and two biscuits for food. It took him 18 hours, solo, through whipping wind, whiteout blizzards, and freezing rain, and he did it after already having traveled 1500 miles on foot over the course of the previous three months.
But he got there.
And he came back with help.
Tom Crean rescued Teddy Evans through a superhuman feat of badassitude, but then he STILL wasn't done – he went back towards the pole, found Scott's frozen body, recovered his fallen friend's journals and photographs, and buried him where he fell. Then, and only then, did he return.
It would be a short-lived return to Ireland though, because two years later another of Crean's former traveling buddies contacted him about going back to Antarctica for another dangerous mission.
That friend was Ernest Shackleton, and the ensuing voyage is probably one of the most insane adventures in recorded history.
In 1914 Crean set sail aboard Endurance, serving as the mission's Second Officer. The plan was to find a Southwest Passage to the South Pole, and basically sail out through areas that had never been seen before (the pole had already been gained a couple years earlier by Roald Amundsen), but, as with Discovery, the ship ended up getting itself wedged in the ice and couldn't be dug out.
Then, to make things worse, the ice cracked the Endurance's hull, smashing the ship to pieces and rendering it completely unseaworthy.
Shackleton and Crean were stuck in Antarctica without a ship.
So, of course, Crean solved that shit by dragging one of the Endurance's rowboats a couple hundred miles through an arctic hellscape, rowing 800 miles through the freezing wastes of the Weddell Sea, weathering a hurricane in a rowboat, and landing on Elephant Island.
But he still wasn't done.
Then, as one of only four men who wasn't about to die from fatigue and exhaustion, he took that boat from Elephant Island across another couple hundred miles of uncharted, turbulent, innavigable water, landed at South Georgia, then walked 40 miles across a frozen ice-capped mountain range to get help.
I get more into this adventure on the Shackleton page – but Tom Crean was one of the men who joined him on that insane return voyage, and was at his side throughout the entire thing. It's one of the most superhuman feats of awesomeness in the history of humanity, and it's just one of three such adventures Tom Crean had during his lifetime.
After somehow rowing and walking his way from the South Pole to Argentina, the 40 year-old Crean went home to Ireland, and, amazingly, discovered that the girl he had a crush on since he was a kid was still unmarried. They got married, had four kids, he bought a bar that he renamed the South Pole Inn, and he never talked about anything he did during any of the expeditions I just mentioned. He briefly went back to the service aboard a Royal Navy Warship, the HMS Colleen, during World War I, but it doesn't look like he saw any action. And in 1921 Shackleton asked him to go back on another Antarctic expedition, but Crean had seen enough glacial ice pack for one lifetime and decided he'd rather just run his bar and go home to his wife and not have to spend too many more nights huddled in a canvas tent at the southern tip of the world. He owned and operated his establishment for nearly 20 years before passing away of appendicitis in 1938 at the age of 61. If you go to his hometown today, you can find an adorable statue of him outside his old home, holding an armful of puppies like in that picture above.
If you go to the Ross Ice Shelf in fucking Antarctica and somehow survive the sub-zero temperatures at 77 degrees Latitude, there's also an intimidating-as-hell 8600-foot-tall ice-covered mountain peak named after him.
