Mortimer McCarthy

McCarthy was born in Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland on 15 April 1882.[1] He was brought up in Lower Cove, a small settlement on the east side of the mouth of the River Bandon, about 4 km (2.5 miles) south-east of Kinsale.[2] He started his career as a mariner at the age of 12, when he joined the Royal Navy[lower-alpha 1] as a boy seaman.[2][1] He received the South Africa war medal for serving during the Second Boer War.[1] McCarthy left the navy and moved to New Zealand in 1907, where he became a merchant seaman.[1]

Plaque on the key-side memorial in Kinsale

In 1910, McCarthy volunteered to join the British Antarctic Expedition under Captain Robert Falcon Scott.[1] With Scott, he made three Antarctic voyages.[2] He served on the crew on Scott's failed 1912-13 Terra Nova Expedition which attempted to reach the South Pole.[1] For his service with this expedition he received the Silver Polar Medal from King George V at a Buckingham Palace investiture.[3][1] After failing in his attempt to get a place on another Antarctic expedition, on Endurance with Sir Ernest Shackleton for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he joined the Northern Exploration Company in Tromsø in Northern Norway which gave him the opportunity to work in the Arctic.[1]

McCarthy rejoined the Royal Navy to serve on destroyers during the First World War.[1] He settled again in Lyttelton, New Zealand in 1920.[4]

In 1963, at 84 years old, as one of the last three living survivors of Scott's Antarctic expedition, he accepted an invitation from the American Antarctic Survey to visit the Antarctic once more.[2] On the trip he became the oldest person to ever visit the South Pole.[4][1] He died in New Zealand in 1967 aged 85.[2]

He had three sons with his wife Ellen Coughlan who he married in 1923 and who was also from Kinsale.[1]

The McCarthy brothers' memorial in Kinsale

Mount McCarthy in Antarctica is named after him.[5] McCarthy's brother, Tim, was also a sailor and polar explorer, and in September 2000 joint statues of the two of them were unveiled in their home town of Kinsale.[1]