Perce Blackborow
British explorer (1894–1949)
Perce Blackborow (1896–1949) was a Welsh sailor and a stowaway on Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917.
Biography
Blackborow was born in 1896 in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales.
Intruder on Endurance
Blackborow and his friend, William Lincoln Bakewell, travelled to Buenos Aires looking for new employment. There, Bakewell was taken on as an able seaman by Shackleton's ship Endurance, which was en route to the Antarctic, but Blackborow was not hired; at age 18, his youth and inexperience counted against him. Fearing that Endurance was shorthanded, Bakewell and Walter How helped Blackborow sneak aboard, and hid him in a locker amongst piles of clothing. On the third day at sea, once there was no reasonable possibility of turning back, the stowaway was discovered.
Unable to stand, Blackborow had to remain seated in a chair when he met Ernest Shackleton for the first time. Apparently in a fit of genuine rage, Shackleton subjected the stowaway to a most severe and terrifying tirade in front of the entire crew. This had the desired effect and the reactions of the two accomplices were enough to unmask them. Shackleton finished his performance by saying to Blackborow, "Do you know that on these expeditions we often get very hungry, and if there is a stowaway available he is the first to be eaten?" To which Blackborow replied, "They’d get a lot more meat off you, sir." Shackleton hid a grin and after chatting with one of the crew members said "Introduce him to the cook first."
Blackborow proved an asset to the ship as a steward and was eventually signed on.
“Perce Blackborow” enters the record as british explorer (1894–1949). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Perce, Blackborow and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q599469. VIAF identifies the subject as 46151041. The Library of Congress control number is n2004027483. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1896, 1949, 1914 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Perce Blackborow” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.