Undesirable merchant seamen in transit: Harold Shaw, the Antarctic and the asylum

Abstract

This article uses the experiences of ship’s fireman Harold Shaw to expose the confused early twentieth-century legal framework used to restrict the mobility of undesirable merchant seamen. Labelled invariably as a ‘nuisance’, a ‘malingerer’, ‘mentally-deficient’ and ‘epileptic’, Shaw was classed as a prohibited immigrant in New Zealand. Bureaucratic records are used to tell of his life ‘in transit’. His wanderlust took him from Manchester, England, to Tasmania, the Antarctic, New Zealand and back again. Initially hailed as an Antarctic hero alongside his fellows on the Aurora, one-half of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he was unceremoniously expelled from New Zealand. Shaw managed to enter the country again in less glamorous, but no less dramatic circumstances. Local authorities struggled to reconcile the complex legislation designed to protect the health of arriving seamen, but more so that of the public, to deal with Shaw’s liminal status.