Ernest Joyce
Ernest Edward Mills Joyce AM was a Royal Naval seaman and explorer. He participated in four Antarctic expeditions during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, in the early 20th century. He was awarded the Polar Medal with four bars, one of only two men to be so honoured.
About Ernest Joyce in brief
Ernest Edward Mills Joyce AM was a Royal Naval seaman and explorer. He participated in four Antarctic expeditions during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, in the early 20th century. Joyce came from a humble seafaring background and began his naval career as a boy seaman in 1891. He served under both Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton. As a member of the Ross Sea party in Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, Joyce earned an Albert Medal for his actions in bringing the stricken party to safety. He was awarded the Polar Medal with four bars, one of only two men to be so honoured, the other being his contemporary, Frank Wild. Joyce was known as an abrasive personality who attracted adverse as well as positive comments. His effectiveness in the field was widely acknowledged by many of his colleagues, but other aspects of his character were less appreciated – his capacity for bearing grudges, his boastfulness and his distortions of the truth. Joyce’s diaries, and the book he wrote based on them, have been condemned as self-serving and the work of a fabulist. He made no significant material gains from his expeditions, living out his post-AntARctic life in humble circumstances before dying in 1940. His father and grandfather had both been sailors, his father probably within the coastguard service. Joyce had blue eyes and a fair complexion, with a tattoo on his left forearm and a scar on his right cheek, only 5′ 7″ in height.
He did not figure in the main journeys of the expedition, although at the end he joined Frank Wild in an attempt to climb Mount Erebus. On one occasion Joyce was at some times badly affected by frostbite, and held two officers, Michael Barne and George Mulock, against the pits of their stomachs and kneaded ankle for several hours to save it from amputation. However, such experiences left Joyce undaunted; he would return to the Antarctic again and again in later years. He died in 1940 at the age of 64, and was buried in a shallow grave in the West Sussex suburb of Feltham, where he lived with his wife and three children. He is survived by his wife, two children and a step-son, and two step-great-grandchildren. He had no children of his own, but was the father of a son and step-grandson, both of whom are now in their late 80s and 90s, and a grandson of a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Joyce died in a nursing home in Hampshire, and is buried in the town of St Pancras, near his former home of Chadderton, in Hampshire. He left behind a wife and two children, including a son who went on to serve in the Royal Navy in the Second World War. He also had a daughter, a son-in-law, a grandson and a great-granddaughter, who is now in the United States.
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This page is based on the article Ernest Joyce published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
