Endurance sank in the ice, and his lifeboat voyage became legend
Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922) led three British Antarctic expeditions in the Heroic Age. After Amundsen took the Pole in 1911, he set out to cross the continent—until Endurance was crushed in Weddell Sea pack ice on 21 November 1915 and survival became the only goal.
Born in Kilkea, County Kildare, on 15 February 1874 to a family of West Yorkshire origin, he moved to Dublin when his father went to study medicine and then, at ten, to Sydenham in London. A hungry reader but an indifferent pupil at Dulwich College, he later grumbled that school taught him almost no geography. At sixteen he went to sea as an apprentice on the square-rigger Hoghton Tower, and by 1898 he had qualified as a master mariner able to command a British ship anywhere. Union-Castle shipmates remembered a young officer who recited Keats and Browning.
A contact with the backer Llewellyn Longstaff won him the post of third officer on Scott’s Discovery expedition, which left London on 31 July 1901. He flew in an experimental balloon and joined Scott and Edward Wilson on the southern march that set out on 2 November 1902. All 22 dogs died after their food spoiled, the men suffered snow blindness and scurvy, and they still reached a record 82°17′ S. Shackleton broke down on the way back and was shipped home on the relief vessel Morning; some suspect Scott resented his popularity.
On the Nimrod expedition of 1907–09 he and three others reached 88°23′ S, just 97 geographical miles from the Pole, while teammates climbed Mount Erebus; Edward VII knighted him. His crossing attempt ended when Endurance sank. The men camped on the floes until they broke up, rowed to Elephant Island, and then sailed 720 nautical miles through storms to South Georgia.
Heading south again with the Shackleton–Rowett expedition in 1921, he died of a heart attack aboard ship at South Georgia in January 1922, heavily in debt, and lies in Grytviken cemetery. Long eclipsed by Scott, he was later hailed as a model for leading in disaster, placing eleventh in a 2002 BBC poll of great Britons; the wreck of Endurance was found just over a century after his death.
Source: Ernest Shackleton
