Kent Law Clinic solicitor Sheona York spent her vacation completing an expedition in the Antarctic this summer, following in the footsteps of polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.
Sheona, an immigration and asylum specialist, is also an accomplished rock climber and mountaineer with 30 years of experience amassed from climbing in the UK and across the world.
This year she joined an Australian commercial expedition to mark the 100 years’ anniversary of the final leg of Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. In 1917, Shackleton was forced to sail 800 miles with five men to seek help from a remote whaling station in Stromness on the island of South Georgia while his remaining crew of 22 men were left stranded on a tiny rocky beach on Elephant Island.
Sheona began her own epic journey in Ushuaia, on the southern tip of South America where she sailed in a Russian boat with a Russian crew, 50 passengers and 10 expedition staff to the Antarctic peninsular. From there, following in Shackleton’s footsteps, the expedition crossed the Weddell Sea to Elephant Island and then on to the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic Ocean. Sheona was one of only six experienced climbers chosen to make the two-day traverse of the South Georgia mountains.
The gruelling voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia took two weeks for Shackleton but only three days for Sheona although 12 hours spent sailing in a force 12 gale proved to be a daunting experience. Sheona said: ‘It felt like being in a washing machine on spin, with the ship juddering as if cars and locomotives were being thrown at it, and waves breaking over the entire deck. Hard to even remain lying down in a cabin bunk without being thrown onto the floor with all our belongings. Hard indeed to imagine how six men survived in an open wooden boat, navigating by dead reckoning and making calculations with a pencil from damp log tables and chipping ice off their only sail.’
By the time Shackleton reached South Georgia his small crew had run out of fresh water and were forced to land on the west coast of the island. To reach the whaling station on the east coast, Shackleton took just two companions to cross the unmapped mountainous interior of South Georgia – in winter. After successfully following in Shackleton’s footsteps across crevasses and high passes to reach Fortuna Bay, Sheona’s team was rejoined by the rest of the crew and passengers for a final 7km hike over a pass to Stromness.
In the museum at Grytviken, a remote whaling station on the island where Shackleton is buried, Sheona later saw the climbing equipment used by Shackleton’s crew – a brass sextant, a Primus stove, leather boots with screws for crampons, a carpenter’s adze for an ice axe, and some old ship’s rope. Sheona said: ‘It was sobering for us climbers, with beautiful lightweight modern equipment including GPS, and absolutely perfect weather, to cross this terrain. Even for us there was no prospect of any rescue, since we were the only serious climbers on the ship, and the nearest medical services were on the Falklands, another three days sail away. Crossing through the crevasses, our guide would say “Footwork of your life, ladies!”
Sheona has previously climbed extensively in the Arabian desert where she was among the first Europeans to ascend many traditional Bedouin routes without a guide. She has also climbed the Munros in Scotland, her own account of which is available from Amazon (and a film of her climbing her ‘last Munro’ is on YouTube.)
Back on terra firma, Sheona is also a Reader at the Law Clinic where she is involved in teaching, research and policy work. Before joining the Clinic, she practised for many years at Hammersmith & Fulham Community Law Centre and was Principal Legal Officer for the Immigration Advisory Service. In April 2015, the ITV drama Code of a Killer highlighted the pivotal role that Sheona had played in pioneering the use of DNA fingerprinting in legal proceedings in 1985.
