Old whisky can be found in some pretty amazing places. I've heard of it stashed in the walls of houses, buried under ground, and discovered in shipwrecks under the ocean. But the trove left by Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton might be the most unusual. Shackelton and his crew left two cases of Scotch whisky stashed under the floorboard of a small wooden shack at Cape Royds.

The whisky was discovered by conservators in January 2006. They were unable to get the crates out but will be trying again in January during the Antarctic summer. It's not known what shape the bottles of Charles Mackinlay & Co. whisky will be in after one hundred years of freeze and thaw. The crates and bottles will remain in Antarctica unless they need to be taken off the continent for conservation reasons.

Richard Paterson, master blender at Whyte & Mackay, the company that now owns the Mackinlay label, would like to be able to taste the whisky. He has a 1907 letter from Shackleton along with a photograph of the bottles' label. He tells the Global Post he would like to extract some by sticking a needle through the cork and taking out liquid with a syringe. If the corks remained intact the whisky could taste much like it did in Shackleton's day but if the corks were dislodged and oxygen got in the taste may have been compromised. If a bottle were to make it out of Antarctica and onto the open market it could fetch over $1,00 a bottle not as much for the taste but for the provenance.

With global warming proceeding briskly along, a collected polar-themed library might be even more of a precious relic. On May 24 Swann Galleries in New York will auction off 160 items from the Polar Library of Dr. John M. Levinson, a past President of the Explorers Club, who has assembled an collection of works on Arctic and Antarctic exploration. One of the star lots in the auction is one of only 65 extant copies of the first book published in Antarctica, Ernest Shackleton's Aurora Australis, 1908. This copy of the book is known as the "Veal" copy because boards from a packing crate containing veal were used to create its cover. This book is inscribed to expedition member George Buckley and signed by Shackleton and others and estimated to sell for $50,000 to $75,000. Other lots include other books by Shackleton, a complete set of first editions of all three of James Cook's Voyages, in nine volumes, copies of The South Polar Times, the first Antarctic newspaper, edited by Shackleton, Louis Charles Bernacchi and Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Charles Swaine's rare Account of a Voyage of Discovery of a North-West Passage from 1748, a set of first editions of each of William E. Parry's four Voyages, and artifacts such as a message buoy used on the 1901-02 Baldwin-Ziegler Expedition to the North Pole via Franz Josef Land and silver and china from various expeditions.

You don't think of the Burberry set as being the rough-and-tumble crowd but their Endurance watches make a strong argument for manliness. It's not as big as the Hublot Big Bang, but at 42mm across the Burberry Expedition Antarctica Big Date is no shrimp. All the Endurance watches feature a map of the continent (buy now before global warming changes the landscape). This watch has a rubber wristband and a Swiss Ronda quartz movement with a big-date feature and sells for $475.

[via Time Zone]