In the summer of 1907, an Anglo-Irish explorer named Ernest Shackleton was putting together a voyage to Antarctica. He meant to be the first man to reach the South Pole — and he needed a ship, a crew, and a doctor who could handle rough oceans and long silences.

Among the men Shackleton chose was a young Perth doctor named Rupert Michell.

The road to sea.

Michell was born in Perth, Ontario, on October 18, 1879. Perth is where his schooling began. From there, medical training took him to the University of Toronto and then across the Atlantic to London, England, for post-graduate work.

By his late twenties, he was a qualified surgeon looking for the kind of work that would take him somewhere.

He found it on ships.

The African coast.

Michell hired on as ship’s surgeon on merchant vessels sailing the west coast of Africa. Congo. Kalabar. Small boats. Hard weather. Tropical fevers.

A young Canadian doctor learning what medicine looked like on the other side of the world.

That experience — long voyages, difficult crews, unfamiliar diseases — was what brought his name to Shackleton’s attention.

The Nimrod.

Shackleton’s ship was called the Nimrod — a wooden sealer refitted for Antarctic ice. She sailed from Lyttelton, New Zealand, on New Year’s Day, 1908, bound for the Ross Sea.

Michell served as her ship’s surgeon throughout the expedition. His role was distinct from Eric Marshall and Alister Mackay, the two shore-party doctors who wintered on the ice with Shackleton and made the push toward the pole.

Ship’s surgeons stayed with the ship.

Michell cared for the Nimrod‘s crew. He helped ferry supplies to and from the shore parties during the Antarctic summers. He joined several of the expedition’s exploring parties. And when the Nimrod sailed north to winter over in New Zealand, Michell went with her — then sailed back into the ice with the ship in early 1909 to bring Shackleton and his men home.

Shackleton’s shore party had turned back a hundred miles short of the pole. But they had gone further south than any human being ever had before.

The expedition returned to England in June 1909 to national celebration. Shackleton was knighted.

The lecture circuit.

Michell came home to Canada.

A Perth-born doctor who had seen the bottom of the world had stories nobody else could tell — and Ontario audiences wanted to hear them. Lectures across the province filled halls.

When Shackleton himself came to Canada on his own speaking tour, he made a point of meeting Michell in person.

The Department of Health.

Medical practice took Michell to Northern Ontario. Eventually, public-health work drew him in fully. The Ontario Department of Health appointed him director of its North Bay office — responsible for public medicine across a large stretch of the north.

In 1935, the department transferred him to Ottawa. He served there until his retirement in 1949.

Rupert Michell died on July 20, 1966, at age 86.

The Perth boy who went south.

There aren’t many people in the world who can say they sailed to Antarctica with Ernest Shackleton and came home to tell about it.

Rupert Michell was one of them.

Born in a small town on the Rideau Canal. Trained in Toronto. Trained again in London. Sea legs off the coast of Africa. And then, aboard a wooden sealer called the Nimrod, south into ice no Canadian had ever seen before.

Perth was where the voyage began.

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