£300 - £500
± Entrance Bovril Pemmican An extraordinary tin of Pemmican, originally taken to the Antarctic by Captain Falcon Scott on his British Antarctic Expedition & Retrieved many years later. H12cm x 7.5cm diameter. Pemmican is a mixture of tallow, dried meat, and sometimes dried berries. North Pole explorer Robert Peary used pemmican on all three of his expeditions, from 1886 to 1909, for both his men and his dogs. In his 1917 book, Secrets of Polar Travel, he devoted several pages to the food, stating, "Too much cannot be said of the importance of pemmican to a polar expedition. It is an absolute sine qua non. Without it a sledge-party cannot compact its supplies within a limit of weight to make a serious polar journey successful." British polar expeditions fed a type of pemmican to their dogs as "sledging rations". Called "Bovril pemmican" or simply "dog pemmican", it was a beef product consisting, by volume, of 2⁄3 protein and 1⁄3 fat (i.e., a 2:1 ratio of protein to fat), without carbohydrate. It was later ascertained that although the dogs survived on it, this was not a nutritious and healthy diet for them, being too high in protein. Members of Ernest Shackleton's 1914–1916 expedition to the Antarctic resorted to eating dog pemmican when they were stranded on ice during the antarctic summer. "Within the stables were bays and at one end was a small stove designed to burn blubber as a fuel. This was used to cook mash for the ponies and pemmican for the dogs." the tin is not leaking but has light surface rust to varying degrees most prominent to the top the soldered seam is in good order. - This lot will be subject to an additional VAT charge of 20% on the hammer price
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