78

Ernest Shackleton

1874–1922

 

There have been notable Irish explorers who have made their contribution to the slow unveiling and discovery of the world.  Such figures as Sir Richard Burton, Admiral McClintock, and Surgeon Major T.H. Parke are well known.  But none achieved more, and more bravely, than Ernest Henry Shackleton, the polar explorer.

      He was born on 14th February 1874, at Kilkee in County Clare in the west of Ireland.  His family were of Anglo-Irish stock, and he was educated at Dulwich College (also the alma mater of P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler).  He entered the British merchant marine because it was a career likely to offer adventure.

      In the first of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott's expeditions to the Antarctic, from 1901 to 1904, he acted as a lieutenant.  Their ship Discovery had been specially built for the purpose of ice exploration.  It was the plan that the ship would remain for a winter in the ice of McMurdo Sound after a preliminary cruise along the coast of what Scott called King Edward Land.  It took a little time to develop the right techniques for sledging on the ice, but then the expedition began a series of shore journeys.  The principal one was made by Scott, Shackleton and Dr Edward Wilson over the ice towards the south.  Though they lost many dogs, they reached 82 degrees, 17 minutes south.  But on the return leg, Shackletons's health gave way and he had to be sent home on the relief ship.  He missed out on the excitement of the second year.

      On his arrival in London, Shackleton began planning another expedition of his own, which started in 1908 from a port in New Zealand in a small whaler called Nimrod, reaching a position ninety-seven miles from the South Pole.  This expedition made use of Mongolian ponies rather than dogs.  Its greatest achievement was a journey made by Shackleton himself with three companions up the Beardmore Glacier, opening a route to the polar plateau and the goal of the South Pole itself.  In all the annals of polar exploration, this ranks as one of the greatest journeys by sledge ever made without the aid of supporting parties.  (These days, so-called explorers have everything, including journalists, flown in by air.)  They narrowly escaped death from the cold and exhaustion, much the same causes that led to the disaster that overwhelmed Captain Scott and his party on their return from the pole in 1912.  But Shackleton managed to preserve his party and return to the ship, all without losing a single man.  On his return to the United Kingdom he was knighted, in 1909.  He described the adventures of the expedition in a book Heart of the Antarctic (1909).

      On 7th August 1914, unperturbed by the death of Scott, Shackleton left England on the Endurance, for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which he had carefully planned.  It was intended to cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross by way of the South Pole.  The Endurance reached the Weddell Sea in December 1914, soon after the First World War had begun.  It moved slowly south, but though they made some significant discoveries, they could find nowhere to land, and drifted north again with the ice.  On 27th October 1915, the ship was crushed to destruction in the ice and had to be abandoned.  The party of twenty-eight camped on an ice floe.  They drifted north on this for 457 days, until it broke up.  The survivors took to their small boats, and six days later landed on Elephant Island, where they recamped on a small patch beneath the great cliffs of ice.

      Shackleton and five of the men now set off on an even more hazardous voyage.  By small boat they succeeded in reaching South Georgia, 759 miles away.  He then tried to return to the men on Elephant Island but failed.  However, with the help of a Chilean trawler, he managed to rescue all of the men on 30th August 1916.

      Though the men under Shackleton survived, some of the party in the Ross Sea perished when they were carried away by the ice.  Despite that, this epic boat journey, which had tested Shackleton's skills as a leader, is the most famous episode in the history of exploration.  His courage and sense of command seems to some to be superior to the often foolish attitudes of Scott and his party, who killed themselves by hauling their sledges to the pole and back by hand.  Shackleton's last book, South, published in 1919, describes the hazards of his trip.  The boat journey has been described in more detail in a book by one of the party, Cmdr F.A. Worsley, which is a classic of its kind.

      Shackleton had to wait until 1921 to mount another expedition.  In September 1922 he set out a third time, on the Quest.  But this was to be his last expedition.  On 5th January 1922, he died on South Georgia of angina following influenza.  His companions buried him on the island, and the expedition continued its work under the command of Frank Wild.

      Frank Worsley said of the funeral: 'When looking at Shackleton's grave and the cairn which we, his comrades, erected to his memory on a windswept hill of South Georgia, I meditated on his great deeds.  It seemed to me that among all his achievements and triumphs, great as they were, his one failure was the most glorious.  By self-sacrifice and throwing his own life into the balance he saved every one of his men - not a life was lost - although at times it looked unlikely that one could be saved.'