The Merchant Navy
“For all the good points of Dulwich, my first year at sea was a better school.”
He told The Captain interviewer his wages “were twelve shillings a year”, today worth about £67.
On the full-rigged Hoghton Tower (17,000 tons displacement), five times round Cape Horn to Valparaiso; hard labour loading nitrates. He handled stores, stowed cargo, and designed Venesta plywood packing-cases. Enduring formidable storms; ‘lookout’ when they shipped enormous seas. The sails split and masts fell; he was saved from the sea by his hair. The Captain said Ernest was “the most pig-headed, obstinate boy he had ever come across”.
Much in his cabin, he wrote letters; read widely, and memorised:
“I seemed to get at the heart of poetry then, to see its meaning, to understand its message, and to some degree to catch its spirit."
Later on, Edward Wilson (1872-1912; junior surgeon, zoologist and expedition artist on Discovery) wrote that Shackleton “knew nearly every bit of poetry that had ever been written and was always ready to quote it”.
Joining another ship in the East India Dock, he arrived on board in January without an overcoat. With one or two books under his arm, he immediately began to talk about Robert Browning to his fellow officers. On watch, teased by the Captain:
“Is the glorious orb of day visible, Mr. Shackleton?” – “No, sir, the effulgence of King Sol is temporarily obscured by the nebulous condition of the intervening atmosphere.”
Shackleton qualified as second mate in 1894 but joined as third mate on the tramp steamer Monmouthshire. For five years he voyaged to America and the Far East, gaining his master’s certificate at twenty-four in 1898. On leave, he watched cricket and rugby at Dulwich; his old form-master, with whom he chatted on the touch-line, got him a job with Sir Donald Currie’s (superior) Union Castle Line; meanwhile in 1899 he became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
H.R. Mill wrote that Shackleton had a “pronounced Celtic strain”, with a natural sailor’s daring, with brilliant imagination and versatility. The words his establishment enemies would later use of him would be tellingly tribal: recurrently he was a “buccaneer”, a “lawless adventurer” and “cad”; his words were “blarney”.
Trooping to the Sea
In 1899 Shackleton transferred to Boer War troop ships as Third Officer. On the Tintagel Castle (3,500 tons) in 1900 he was described by a ship mate as “the life and soul of the ship, popular with the right class of men”, and “always flashing out new ideas” to encourage the 1,200 soldiers – doomed men, many of them, discontented meanwhile with “crowded quarters and constant drill”: his were the entertainments, sports, semaphore classes and a spectacular ‘Father Neptune on the Line’.
Shackleton put an epigraph, or quotation, on the title-page of the cheerful shipboard book ‘O.H.M.S.’ [On Her Majesty’s Service] he wrote and compiled with the ship’s surgeon: a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem, “Troopin’, Troopin’, Troopin’ to the Sea”. (He had approached Kipling, at Cape Town by chance, asking for a poem to help sell their book, but in vain). He personally saw ‘O.H.M.S.’ through the press and distributed it to two thousand subscribers; for Queen Victoria, a specially bound copy.
Describing the departure of the troops, he wrote, “The Southern Cross must look down on many a shallow grave”, touched by the farewells to the soldiers of the Queen “seeking glory and death” from fiancées and sisters with sad “sweet eyes” (his own familiar name for his fiancée, Emily Dorman). Poems by the men made the book a prototype of the later glorified expedition magazines he would edit, the South Polar Times and Aurora Australis. On the flyleaf to Emily, his literary ambitions are clear: he offers her his “First Fruits”.
1901–1904, Discovery: the National Antarctic Expedition
Shackleton first heard about the proposed Discovery expedition in the Society‘s Geographical Journal. Released by the Union Castle Line, he joined as Third Lieutenant to Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912). The specially designed Discovery (172 feet, 1,620 tons) was barque-rigged, with auxiliary steam; world-famous, she is now moored at Discovery Point, Dundee. The expedition was organised by the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society, to explore the unknown Antarctic continent. Shackleton wrote of how the explorer is lured by “wild stretches of snow and ice, the silence of those places where man never trod before”; it is also said that “over-mastering passion” for Emily Dorman drove his ambition, needing a better “pecuniary situation” to end a long engagement, the condition her father made before he would consent to their union.
Queen Alexandra remarked on Henry Shackleton’s fine carnations in Ernest’s cabin, seen here before they set sail. The Remington typewriter used for the expedition magazine he edited, the South Polar Times; framed photos of Emily, his family (including Frank); an affectionate initialled cushion.
Shackleton had got together the expedition library (including sets of Walter Scott and Punch), also theatrical wigs and costumes. In charge of ‘entertainments’, once again, he kept up spirits with concerts, minstrel shows, and plays at the ‘Royal Terror Theatre’, boasting a drop-curtain and piano, at the Winter Quarters hut on Ross Island (at the head of McMurdo Sound). Here Frank Wild (1873-1939) was thought the best actor, as Mr. Aspen Quiver in The Ticket of Leave Man. Fourteen years later as Second-in-command on the Endurance expedition he was to keep up the morale of the men on Elephant Island after Shackleton left on the James Caird.
On the voyage out, in the starlit Bay of Biscay, H.R. Mill (accompanying them to Madeira) met him on the Bridge, after midnight:
“I discovered his individuality and recognised how he differed in turn of phrase and trend of mind from the other splendid fellows … the ceaseless flow of quotation from the poets called forth by the summer night, the stars, the phosphorescence of the sea.”
On the contrary, Bernacchi, handing over the 4.00am watch, tells us Shackleton,
“… in his wheedling Irish manner kept me from my bunk reciting endless verses in voice and manner of an old-time tragedian … ‘One moment, old son’, as I edged towards the gangway, ‘have you heard this?’”
Ernest Shackleton, ‘To the Great Barrier’ from the South Polar Times:
“Ah, what is the secret you’re keeping, to the Southward, beyond our ken? This year shall your icy fastness resound with the voices of men?
This year shall your icy fastness resound with the voices of men?
Shall we learn that you come from the mountains?
Shall we call you a frozen sea?
Shall we sail to the Northward and leave you, still a Secret ever to be?”
Shackleton was responsible for stores, and (impatiently) for testing sea-water samples for salinity and density – chemical bottles fill a shelf in the photograph of his cabin. Scott tells us in The Voyage of the ‘Discovery’ (1905) that Shackleton also looked after the dogs, and regulated the cooking arrangements.
Newly commissioned into the Royal Naval Reserve, he still faced prejudice among Scott’s Navy officers as a ‘cargo-shifter’ from a tramp steamer, but earned their warm popularity, as he did among the crewmen from the lower deck; among the latter were Tom Crean, Ernest Joyce, Edward Evans, and Frank Wild (whom he helped to study for navigation exams). He played practical jokes; he was fined five times at one meal for betting someone was wrong; he won a Tuesday after-dinner debate claiming Browning was greater than Tennyson, by one vote.
Shackleton’s photographic balloon ascent
Scott, having discovered and named King Edward VII Land, the peninsula projecting into the Ross Sea, moored Discovery at Ross Island, close to the volcanic Mount Erebus. On board was an army hydrogen ‘Captive’ Balloon, for a single observer, Eva: Sir Joseph Hooker (1817-1911) had suggested they make a balloon observation into the hidden unknown land mass over the southern ice wall, the Great Barrier (Ross Ice Shelf) faced on arrival. Scott went up first, and wrote in his diary, “Perhaps rather selfishly I chose the honour for myself. Swayed about doubtful of wisdom”. The fabric was torn, and a valve was faulty. Shackleton (who had taken a short course at Aldershot on ballooning) ascended next, a hundred feet higher, to 650 feet, and took the first aerial Antarctic photographs. Not until 1928 was there a flight over the continent, first made by Hubert Wilkins (ornithologist on Shackleton’s Quest expedition in 1922), sponsored by William Randolph Hearst, who took many photographs. (Reginald Skelton, 1872-1956, was Scott’s official Discovery expedition photographer).
Edward Wilson’s diary:
“If nobody is killed it will only be because God has pity on the foolish”.
Shackleton in the air thought of Browning, writing in his diary:
“The whole place had a weird and uncanny look and reminded one of the desert in ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’.”
Shackleton’s ‘rum idea’
Shackleton was keen on new technology, inventing this ‘cart’ with rum-cask wheels and dinghy sails; on soft snow it did not work. On Nimrod he would bring a motor-car and on Quest an aeroplane. Scott wrote about the contraption with mild sneers, apparently delighted it failed to replace sledging:
“Shackleton has invented a new sledge, or rather a vehicle to answer the same purpose, much to the amusement of his messmates who scoff unmercifully. The manufacture of this strange machine has been kept the profoundest secret between the inventor and the maker, our excellent carpenter. It was to burst suddenly on our awestruck world, to carry immediate conviction as it trundled easily over the floe, to revolutionise all ideas of polar travelling, and once and for all to wipe the obsolete sledge from off the surface of the snow … Advice was most freely given, but it was generally to the effect that it would be kind to remove such an eyesore by immediate burial and oblivion.”
Polar sledging and its origins
The ‘polar style’ of expedition, used during the successive searches for John Franklin and the missing crews of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror; the two ships lost in the Arctic during the search for the North West Passage, involved sledging, man-hauled or with dogs, with flags, over-manned, ill equipped. Sir Clements Markham (1830-1916), as President of the Royal Geographical Society, prescribed the same style for Scott on the Discovery expedition in 1901.
Scott wrote that polar sledging was “an English production”, a function of “that feverish energy in exploration which has distinguished our race for so many centuries”. Moreover, sledging “… draws men into a closer companionship than can any other mode of life. In its light the fraud must be quickly exposed, but in its light also the true man stands out in all his natural strength.” It was “a sure test of a man’s character”… self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, “cheerfulness under adversity”.
Scott set Shackleton to make up rations and lead one of the very first Antarctic sledging journeys from Discovery’s Winter Quarters at the head of McMurdo Sound.
The South Polar Times
In winter 1902 Shackleton (editor by ‘general consent’) typed the first five monthly issues of the South Polar Times, illustrated mostly by Edward Wilson. The men as well as the officers contributed. Returned to London, Shackleton got it published and oversaw production. He included photographs, poems, weather reports, essays, cartoons, and scientific observations. Each issue was read aloud to the assembled crew.
1902, Farthest South: Scott, Shackleton and Wilson
For the great summer sledging journey towards the South Pole, beyond the ‘Great Barrier,’ Scott chose Wilson; then “unanimously” the two picked Shackleton. He wrote to Emily telling her his return was doubtful; he was taking “your little photo”. He had charge of the dogs and practised with ski.
“Shackleton had fluttering from the bow of the sledge the Shackleton arms and their appropriate motto, Fortitudine Vincimus” (Mill).
On the way he invented the ‘shut-eye’ method of sharing out portions of food fairly. The dogs died or had to be shot, fed wrongly with the Norwegian ‘stock-fish’ Nansen recommended; Scott was too squeamish to butcher them. Shackleton accidentally knocked over a ‘hoosh pot’, spilled the food and burnt a hole in the groundsheet, causing an angry row with Scott of pent-up resentments on both sides.
On Christmas Day Shackleton produced from a spare sock a plum pudding “about the size of a cricket ball” and “a crumpled piece of artificial holly” (Scott).
Their Farthest South, all but two months out, on 30 December 1902, less than 500 miles from the South Pole and 270 miles from base, was a disappointing 82° 17ʹ S. It faced a broad valley; Scott named it ‘Shackleton Inlet’. Returning, the three men showed signs of scurvy; Shackleton coughed blood. Forbidden to pull the sledge or to do heavy work, he struggled on, and was carried briefly on the sledge to steer and as a brake, going too fast with an improvised sail in a southerly gale.
Scott’s diary is uncomfortable to read: “our invalid”, and the “lame duck”, suggesting that Shackleton was the only afflicted member of the team.
Back at the base, Scott’s two surgeons advised that Shackleton be invalided home as unfit in the relief ship Morning. On March 2, 1903, given three hearty cheers by the men, Shackleton on embarking openly burst into tears. He wrote in his diary, “I must needs go back as soon as I can”. He used to say it was the worst disappointment of all his life.
Scott’s official report perhaps protested too much his ostensibly good motives:
“This gentleman has performed his work in a highly satisfactory manner, but unfortunately his constitution has proved unequal to the rigours of a polar climate. It is with great reluctance that I order his return, and trust that it will be made evident that I do so solely on account of his health and that his future prospects may not suffer.”
Marriage, Secretary of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and Early Enterprises
1904, Westminster, Christchurch, 9 April
Shackleton, 30 years old, marries Emily Mary Dorman (1868–1936), 36, a friend of his sister Kathleen. It was six years since he had declared he was in love with her; her father had died while Shackleton was on the Discovery expedition.
After marriage and a brief, half-hearted job as assistant editor for the Royal Magazine, Ernest was appointed Secretary to the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, taking Emily to Edinburgh. Drawn to politics, he fought the 1906 General Election seat at Dundee (surprising his friends by his naiveté), candidate for Joseph Chamberlain’s new Liberal Unionist party; of five candidates he came fourth. Restless commercial initiatives did not prosper: he visited the Continent with a scheme for a great international news agency, and among others established a long-term minor enterprise, marketing with the help of his Piccadilly tobacconist a brand of Turkish cigarettes, named The Tabard. Next, he became a ‘personal assistant’ (public relations) to William Beardmore (1856-1936, Lord Invernairn) at his Glasgow engineering works.
Shackleton began to raise funds for an attempt on the South Pole.
The four-year-old stigma of Scott sending Shackleton home as unfit was compounded by the malign account given recently to the public of his lieutenant’s ‘breakdown’ on the Southern Journey in The Voyage of ‘The Discovery’ (1905). The attempt might bring Shackleton purpose and prosperity. “I am just good as an explorer, and nothing else”, he would write later to Emily in 1914, leaving again, for Endurance.
A. E. W. Mason (1865-1948), wrote an excellent novel The Turnstile (1912), with an Antarctic explorer hero, Captain Harry Rames (based on his friend Scott), and a very detailed familiar sub-plot involving him and a rival South Polar explorer, clearly based on Shackleton. Mason’s hero declares,
“You have got to surround your expedition with a scientific halo. It gets you money, and official support and the countenance of the learned societies. But the man who goes southwards into the ice goes with just one object – to reach the Pole … Such men are just driven on by a torment of their souls. Let a man become insane in the East, and he’s looked upon as a holy man, touched by the finger of God. The fellows who go south and north are our holy men of the West.”
1907 – 1909 Nimrod Expedition
The British Antarctic Expedition
Shackleton announced his enterprise in 1907, when foreign Antarctic competition was worrying the British. Denied institutional or public funding, his first subscriber was Beardmore. He bought a forty-year-old sealer Nimrod (200 tons), less than half the size of Discovery; he said he would change her name to Endurance, from the family motto.
An excellent if mostly inexperienced shore party of 14 was recruited, among them Frank Wild, George Marston (recommended by Kathleen for expedition artist) and Sir Philip Brocklehurst (aged 19), also some distinguished scientists. Jameson Boyd Adams, his second in command, said Shackleton’s men recognised in him an “almost supernatural intuition for selecting men who believed in him implicitly and who were proud to have the honour of participating in his great adventure”.
He consulted Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), polar hero of the day, and from 1906 the first appointed Minister at the Norwegian Legation in London, who believed skis were paramount in attempting the Pole. However, Shackleton bought ten Manchurian sledge ponies, the first in the Antarctic; from Norway he ordered Nansen sledges, primus stoves, reindeer sleeping-bags, and for footwear, finnesko (reindeer-skin boots) and sennegrass (which absorbs sweat). An Arrol-Johnston motor car from Beardmore’s works (two-ton, 15 hp., specially adapted) was to pull sledges; like Shackleton’s rum-cask cart on Discovery, it was to fail on soft snow. In New Zealand, as an afterthought, he would pick up nine sledge dogs in reserve.
At Cowes, by command of King Edward VII, Shackleton was to stop for a royal inspection; Queen Alexandra personally entrusted him with a Union Flag.
Shackleton and Scott
Shackleton was surprised by a letter from Scott in Gibraltar saying that landing near the Discovery hut would cut right cross his own path, and Scott himself had a proper right to that field of work. He appeared to have convinced himself that “I think this is not a dog in the manger attitude … I know the region better than anyone”; he appealed to Shackleton as a tribal gentleman: his proposal was not something expected of an ‘Old Discovery’. Shackleton gave a written promise that he would not touch Victoria Land (McMurdo Sound).
On arrival, towed from New Zealand to save coal by the S.S. Koonya on a 600-foot cable, enduring severe gales, ice floes seriously endangered his plan to land on the Barrier Inlet, King Edward VII Land. After much soul-searching he turned round at Balloon Bight (where Eva rose up with Scott and with Shackleton). He now moored and set up winter quarters at Cape Royds on Ross Island, Victoria Land, north of the old Discovery hut.
Landing, on 3 February 1908, was fearful. Much equipment, stores, and parts of the prefabricated hut (33 x 19 feet; 10 x 5.8 metres) were quickly buried deep in frozen sea-spray.
In early March, so soon after arrival, six of Shackleton’s men made the first ascent to the crater of Mount Erebus (12,448 feet), the live volcano on Ross Island, and made a survey; Scott’s Discovery men had explored the foothills.
The party included two remarkable Australian geologists who joined at Sydney, Professor T. W. Edgeworth David and Douglas Mawson (both born in the United Kingdom). Brocklehurst celebrated his 21st birthday on the ascent with frostbite; back in the hut a big toe was amputated. A blizzard sprang up during the descent.
Summer sunsets awed the men at first, wrapping the white summit of Erebus in crimson, but on 14 June 1908, a ‘Strombolian’ eruption, fire from ice, amazed them with columns of steam like Prince of Wales feathers, and fitful red glowing flares at night.
During a locked-down, sunless winter, April to July 1908, the men prepared for the treks that would take them to the heart of the Antarctic, if only a hundred miles short of the South Pole, and to claim the Southern Magnetic Pole for the British Empire. Shackleton occupied his men in the crowded hut, who shared cubicles with cloth partitions, keeping their minds and spirits upbeat to defy ‘polar ennui’ and worse. With the expedition Library in his own cubicle, he was accessible for conversation.
The expedition book 'Aurora Australis', 1908
Before leaving London, Shackleton had sent Wild and Joyce to Joseph Causton’s printing works at Brixton for a three-week course. The men dragged to the hut over the ice from Nimrod a table-top Albion hand-press (of 1820s' design), type, paper and materials and an etching press. Between April and July Shackleton, editor once again, put together his own poems and contributions by eight others to produce an expedition magazine 'extraordinaire', the Aurora Australis. From 60 to 100 volumes were type-set and printed by hand, stitched and bound with leather spines and recycled Venesta plywood packing crate boards. These preserved on the inside stencilled names of their stores, creating the Oatmeal, the Petit Pois, and Soup Julienne and Marmalade copies, for example. Marston etched and lithographed striking illustrations. The contents were in general more serious, literary and scientific than the South Polar Times with its element of mess hilarity, and the book itself was a unique and accomplished ‘private press’ work in a good Arts and Crafts mode, employing minds and hands as John Ruskin would have approved, and easily upstaging Scott’s and Shackleton’s earlier venture on Discovery.
Shackleton remarked on the printers’ heroic endurance. In the sub-zero temperature of the hut they learned to cope: chilled type hurt the hand as if red hot; ink and inking plate had to be warmed with candle or lamp. Setting type in the crowded centre room, a jogged elbow would send the metal letters onto the unsweepable compost of melted blubber from the stove and other filth underfoot; smuts from the stove settled on paper.
We might think of the book as the most interesting artefact from a Polar expedition. It expresses the spirit and character of the commander and his men on the Nimrod expedition and of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration itself. The integrity and skills in this collective endeavour – creative writing, printing and binding, landscape engraving and book illustration – make us forget what tyros they were. Aurora shows again how Shackleton inspired the best in his men.
29 October 1908 – 3 March 1909
The Southern (South Pole) Party
Shackleton chose Wild, Jameson Boyd Adams and Eric Marshall to attempt the Pole with him. He would take four ponies – such as he claimed would be “hardy, sure-footed, and plucky” – but no dogs. Meanwhile, Professor David, Mawson and the second surgeon, Alistair Mackay, departed to discover and possess the South Magnetic Pole, sledging 1,260 miles.
The polar quartet, veering further east from Scott’s former route, discovered and climbed the great Beardmore Glacier, seamed with crevasses, the first to see and set foot on the way beyond to the Pole, the vast South Polar Plateau, on average at c.10,000 feet. They were to achieve some 300 miles beyond the point where the trio of Scott, Shackleton and Wilson turned back on the Discovery expedition; they would be just 97 miles from the Pole. The last remaining sledge-hauling pony, Socks, fell to death in a deep crevasse, nearly taking Wild. With tattered clothing they endured near starvation, the altitude, and bitter cold.
Shackleton pencilled in his diary,
“It is neck or nothing with us now” and “Our food lies ahead, and death stalks us from behind.”
Later, he would write,
“we had to play the game to the utmost and Providence will look after us.”
Wild’s diary, after Shackleton suffered a bad fall:
“S. pulls like the devil ... I don’t know how S. stands it; both his heels are split in four or five places, his legs are bruised and chafed, and today he has a violent headache through falls, and yet he goes along as well as anyone.”
Shackleton describing the Plateau in The Heart of the Antarctic (1909):
“There comes a puff of wind from the north, another from the south, and anon one from the east or west, seeming to obey no law, acting on erratic impulses. It is as though we were at the world’s end and were bursting in on the birthplace of the clouds and the resting home of the four winds, and one has a feeling that we mortals are being watched with a jealous eye by the forces of nature. To add to these weird impressions that seem to grow on one in the apparently limitless waste, the sun tonight was surrounded by mock suns and in the zenith was a bow, turning away from the great vertical circle round the sun. The circles and bows were the colour of the rainbow.”
Christmas Day, 1908
(After crème de menthe and cigars) Wild’s Diary:
“May none but my worst enemies spend their Christmas in such a dreary, godforsaken place as this.”
During a three-day blizzard Shackleton read aloud Shakespeare comedies in the tent.
On 9 January 1909, Shackleton made his courageous decision to give up, at an (estimated) 88° 23ʹ S, and to turn back. They flew Queen Alexandra’s Union Flag, and took possession of the plateau for the King.
H. R. Mill:
“they turned their backs on their unreached goal and started their race of 700 miles, with Death on his pale horse, the blizzard, following close.”
On the return journey, descending the Beardmore fast, they managed to find the depots with supplies they had placed on the way out.
Acute dysentery from raw horse-meat now made it almost impossible for Wild to walk. In his diary he wrote how Shackleton:
“privately forced on me his one breakfast biscuit, & would have given me another one tonight had I allowed him. I do not suppose that anyone else in the world can thoroughly realise how much generosity and sympathy was shown by this; I DO and BY GOD I shall never forget it. Thousands of pounds would not have bought me that biscuit.”
126 days out, 1,725 miles on foot.
Return of 'Nimrod'
The four men feared Nimrod would have left for New Zealand, but she had waited beyond the appointed date of 26 February. Wild and Shackleton went on board on 1 March. Shackleton turned back the same day with a relief party to bring in Marshall, who was in a poor way, and Adams who was looking after him. This took three days. They also picked up the geological specimens from the Cloudmaker mountain and the Beardmore Glacier in their new-found land. On 4 March 1909 they left on Nimrod, all hands safe.
The Captain had been told to assume they were dead by then. During the march Shackleton often discussed, if they should miss the ship, an open boat journey to New Zealand in the Nimrod lifeboat he had deliberately stored at Cape Royds; this imagined exploit prefigures Shackleton’s James Caird winter passage from Elephant Island to South Georgia, for many of us the most heroic and stirring of all recorded historical narratives of open boat journeys.
Return to London, 1909
Emily was waiting at Dover; “better a living donkey than a dead lion”, he said to her about his turning back before reaching the Pole.
At Charing Cross, the papers full of his triumph, the crowds and tumultuous reception showed him already a people’s hero and the man of the day. The King called the expedition the “greatest geographical event of his reign”, and knighted him; at Balmoral he was an honoured guest lecturer.
The Royal Geographical Society held an evening at the Albert Hall on 28 June: the Prince of Wales (later George V), saying he was his "brother-sailor", presented the Society’s Special Gold medal, Members of Council and Fellows sitting on the platform, an audience of 8,000. The men received silver replicas of the medal. Shackleton outlined the expedition with the first showing of the lantern-slides and ‘kinematographic films’. Scott gave a warm and generous vote of thanks for his “magnificent work”:
“We honour him for the manner in which he organized and prepared the expedition, for the very substantial addition he made to human knowledge, but most of all because he has shown us a glorious example of British pluck and endurance”.
Lionised by London society and in wax effigy at Madame Tussaud’s, Shackleton ventured on many lecture tours in the British Isles, Canada, the United States, and on the continent. Asquith told the House of Commons that the expedition’s debts, some £20,000 (well over £2 million today), would be paid from government funds.
Nimrod was towed under the Thames bridges to Temple Pier, where the public paid to visit the ship with an expedition exhibit onboard; Shackleton gave the takings to London hospitals.
The celluloid ‘Kinematographic Pictures’ taken on the Nimrod Expedition, which Shackleton showed at the Albert Hall and elsewhere, are believed to have perished: they showed the motor car struggling in the ice, ponies harnessed and the sledges moving off towards the Pole, Nimrod charging through the pack, and penguins.
Returning to Sydenham, he saw a ‘set-piece’ of Brock’s Fireworks at the Crystal Palace in July 1909: an animated tableau, a scene with moving figures, just like a primitive movie made with pyrotechnic outlines, Lieutenant Shackleton Planting the Union Jack Farthest South.
Shackleton made two recordings about Nimrod:
An Edison wax cylinder, in New Zealand (1909)
A Victrola 78 rpm gramophone record (1910), Sir Ernest Shackleton tells of his dash for the South Pole, giving a moving litany of the men’s names and quoting Robert Service’s poem, The Lone Trail.
1909, At the Savage Club
At a House Dinner “to welcome Lieut. E. H. Shackleton. Capt. R. F. Scott in the Chair”, in June 1909, Scott proposed Shackleton’s health, saying he was “very proud”, as the Observer reported, “to have had a hand in rocking his Antarctic cradle”; he then announced his own plan, that “he had been ready for two years, and the Pole was now to be discovered by an Englishman”.
Shackleton made an excuse to leave immediately after dinner.
October 1909, 'The Heart of the Antarctic'
On a liner from Australia, and then back in England, Shackleton collaborated with an unnamed literary assistant, Edward Saunders (1882-1922), for his two-volume The Heart of the Antarctic, the most lavish of expedition books, published in October 1909. Saunders was a reporter recommended to him by the New Zealand Prime Minister. He told Saunders the story, answered questions, lent him his diary, and dictated special passages. Saunders was also to be editor for South (1919), Shackleton’s expedition book about Endurance.
Saunders wrote:
“S has a remarkable gift of literary suggestion … and when his interest was stirred at critical portions of his narrative, he had a command of vivid forceful English.”
Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) on Shackleton and the Nimrod Expedition:
“Sir Ernest Shackleton’s name will always be written in the annals of Antarctic exploration in letters of fire. Pluck and grit can work wonders, I know of no better example of this than what that man has accomplished.”
Amundsen was now planning a polar expedition; once he heard that Cook and Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole, he went South. The Fram arrived on the Barrier in January 1911.
Undoubtedly Shackleton spurred him:
“Sir Ernest Shackleton! – the name has a brisk sound. At its mere mention we see before us a man of indomitable will and courage.”
It is said that Amundsen believed British ignorance of sledge-dogs, skis and fur clothing had reserved the Pole for himself.
Amundsen and Scott at the Pole
14 December 1911
Amundsen’s South Pole Expedition
Amundsen reached the South Pole from the Bay of Whales with four companions using skis and dog-teams.
17 January 1912
Scott’s 'Terra Nova' Expedition
The British Antarctic Expedition, 1910-13
Scott reached the South Pole from Ross Island with four companions, using ponies and dogs on the Barrier (Ross Ice Shelf) and man-hauling from the Beardmore Glacier.
On the march back to Ross Island Evans and Oates died.
Scott, Bowers and Wilson died in the tent, March 1912.
The Pole reached, an opportunity remains for Shackleton …
Towards the Antarctic, 1890-1909 is the second part of a series of online exhibitions drawing on content from the Society’s exhibition Shackleton’s Legacy and the Power of Early Antarctic Photography, on display in the Society’s Pavilion from 7 February to 4 May 2022.
Exhibition guest curated by Dr Jan Piggott, with supporting contributions from Alasdair MacLeod and Jools Cole. Digital exhibition created by Hania Sosnowska.
About the curator
Dr Jan Piggott, F.S.A. is the former Keeper of Archives, Dulwich College and formerly Head of English at the school. He has published works on W. B. Yeats, J. M. W. Turner, Victorian Architecture and P. G. Wodehouse. In 2000, Dr Piggott was the Curator of the Dulwich College exhibition Shackleton, the Antarctic and Endurance (2000), and edited the accompanying catalogue published that year.
A selection of the Society's images featured in this online exhibition can be purchased from the RGS Print Store.
For more information on how to access and use the Society's Collections please visit our website.
Text © Dr Jan Piggott
Images © Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), unless stated otherwise
Credits and acknowledgements
The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) would like to thank the following organisations and individuals:
Exhibition curators: Meredith Hooper and Dr Jan Piggott
Physical exhibition designers: Sarner International Limited
Sponsored by:
The Shackleton Company | The James Caird Society | The Folio Society | South Georgia Association | Devon and Cornwall Polar Society
Supported by:
The United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust | Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 | British Antarctic Territory | Government of South Georgia & the South Sandwich Islands | Rolex (for its support for the Society's Picture Library and contribution towards conservation of its Collections) | The National Heritage Lottery Fund
The Hon. Alexandra Shackleton, FRGS | Mr Jan Chojecki | Dr Jan Faull | Mr John James | The late Mr Henry Worsley, FRGS
Associated Newspapers Limited | Bridgeman Images | British Antarctic Survey | The British Film Institute | The British Library | Buenos Aires Herald | Christie’s | The Daily Mirror | Dulwich College | Illustrated London News/Mary Evans | Museum of London | The Royal Albert Hall | Scott Polar Research Institute | State Library, New South Wales, Australia | State Library, Victoria, Australia | Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand | USGS, NASA, National Science Foundation