The Ross Sea
10 January 1917
Cape Evans, on the far distant opposite shore of Antarctica from the Weddell Sea, Shackleton rescues seven men of ten, his tragic supporting, secondary Transcontinental Party, and brings their ship Aurora back from New Zealand. Polar historians point out that the lost men were without Shackleton’s protective leadership.
Shackleton said bureaucratic authorities in New Zealand and Australia made the Ross Sea rescue
"The most trying time of all my life ...".
The Endurance men came home – to the ‘Great War’.
Recruiting speech, New South Wales, Sydney
20 March 1917
Shackleton is invited to address 11,000 people at a World War One recruiting rally:
"We lived long dark days in the South. The danger of the moment is a thing easy to meet, and the courage of the moment is in every man at some time. But I want to say to you that we lived through slow dead days of toil, of struggle, dark striving and anxiety; days that called not for heroism in the bright light of day, but simply for dogged persistent endeavour to do what the soul said was right. It is in the same spirit that we men of the British race have to face this war … it means the chance to prove ourselves the captains of our own soul. Death is a very little thing – the smallest thing in the world. I can tell you that, for I have come face to face with death … Perhaps in the quiet hours of night, when you think over the things I have said, you will feel the little snakes of doubt twisting in your heart. I have known them. Put them aside. If we have to die, we die in the pride of manhood, our eyes on the goal and our hearts beating time to the instinct within us."
For theatrical effect, he held up the Union Jack that the King gave the expedition, slowly waving it to endorse the summons of his final sentences:
"You trust me like my own men trusted me during two years, when I say to you men of Australia: face the test of battle. We in the South were only a small party, but we held the flag of our country to the nations of the world. We did that because we were men of the British race, and that our manhood meant more to us than toil, pain or death. Take yourself as a man and GO."
Weary travels
It took Shackleton four months to get back to London. Circuitously – in New Zealand, Australia, and the Americas – coping with complex negotiations about the Expedition, seeking money, publicity and lecturing in the United States.
What part he would play in the War was worrying him.
On a steamer in the Pacific, he wrote to Emily:
"I am old and tired, but you know I have been the means under Providence of carrying out the biggest saving of disaster that has ever been done in the Polar Regions, North or South."
The Expedition royal flags
May 1917
Back in London, Shackleton presented the King’s flag back to George V. He had originally stated in the Prospectus for the Endurance expedition his main motive was patriotic: to "secure for the British flag the honour of being the first carried across the South Polar Continent".
After the ship sank, the first day on the ice he ran up the King’s Flag from the look-out platform; this "cheered us up a lot", wrote Leonard Hussey. They raised a flagstaff at every desolate camp.
On Elephant Island when the Yelcho approached, the silk Union Jack was a frozen mass; on the flagstaff they raised Alexander Macklin’s jersey.
In August he gave back the smaller Union Jack to Alexandra, the Queen Mother. This is now in the Ballroom at Sandringham. To its bamboo staff Shackleton attached a silver shield with his stirring chronicle of the adventures of the flags. He tells how the ship sank, the men took the flags in the boats to Elephant Island, and he retrieved them at the rescue.
The vexed stops and stages of the return set out as if his finger is pointing out the crazy zigzag on a globe:
"I carried [the royal flags] with me from Magellan Straits twice across the Andes in a week, north across the Isthmus of Panama, then across the United States to San Francisco, thence to New Zealand and down to the Ross Sea in the Antarctic, when I went to rescue the marooned men on Ross Island … Back to New Zealand, Australia, across the Pacific to San Francisco, across the American continent, and home to England; and finally I handed back the flag to Her Majesty in August 1917."
Later that year, giving his expedition lecture at Sandringham to the King and Queen, he showed Hurley’s silent film and photographs.
Pro patria
1918, Murmansk, North Russia
Practically all Endurance comrades enlisted in the Great War. Tim McCarthy, Leading Seaman in the Royal Navy Reserve, had already died before Shackleton got home, torpedoed at his gun in the Channel on 16 March 1917. He and Shackleton had landed on the Caird at King Haakon Bay, South Georgia, less than 11 months earlier. Like Tom Crean, McCarthy was Irish, staunch, cheerful, optimistic. McCarthy was twice on the James Caird with Shackleton: between the Weddell Sea ice and Elephant Island, and from there to South Georgia.
Shackleton rejected an Army desk commission dealing with food supplies for the Allies. Following an unpaid Buenos Aires trip to counter German propaganda, he joined the North Russian Expeditionary Force against the Bolsheviks: a temporary Major. Five Arctic months, equipping and training British soldiers, with Endurance men: Wild, Hussey, James McIlroy, Frank Worsley.
'South'
November 1919
South, Shackleton’s own account of the Endurance Expedition is published.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886-1959); with Scott on the Terra Nova and author of The Worst Journey in the World (1922):
"Now I know why it is that every man who served under Shackleton swears by him …"
Shackleton dictated some of the text to Edward Saunders in New Zealand on return from the Ross Sea, over three or four weeks in seriously distracting circumstances; Saunders then worked the book up from diaries, principally Worsley’s.
Shackleton proposed to name Saunders as editor, but he would not allow it. Saunders’ obituary says Shackleton "could spare but little time" because of the War. Hussey made the final edit.
The most eloquent passages have the ring of Shackleton’s voice. In this paragraph he describes exposure in the open boats between the ice and Elephant Island, the night when he feared men would die:
"The temperature was down to 4 degrees below zero, and a film of ice formed on the surface of the sea. When we were not on watch we lay in each other’s arms for warmth. Our frozen suits thawed where our bodies met, and as the slightest movement exposed these comparatively warm spots to the biting air, we clung motionless, whispering each to his companion our hopes and thoughts. Occasionally from an almost clear sky came snow-showers, falling silently on the sea and laying a thin shroud of ice over our bodies and our boats."
Rhythm and sound convey how it felt on the James Caird in the gigantic upheaval of the waves:
"Deep seemed the valleys where we lay between the reeling seas. High were the hills when we perched momentarily on the tops of giant combers."
High points in the heroic saga tend to give rise to quotations from poems he knew by heart: thus the moonlit crossing of South Georgia with Worsley and Crean resonates with Robert Service’s Call of the Wild:
"In memories we were rich. We had 'suffered, starved, and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole'. We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man."
The 'James Caird', 1919
5 December, Birkenhead, Messrs. Grayson’s Shipyard
The James Caird is brought back from South Georgia on board S.S. Woodville.
The rudder, lost in swell when they were landing on South Georgia "miraculously appeared floating on the tide … With all the broad Atlantic to sail in, the rudder had come bobbing back into our cove."
This photo suggests the James Caird had slightly less height above the water than one might think, but two upper raised strakes (planks) are missing, roughly 25 cm in height. Before the boats left for Elephant Island, Harry McNish built them up on the ice, for slightly more freeboard above the waterline. The strakes, removed when they found the boat too heavy to haul up the beach, made firewood in the cave at King Haakon Bay, together with McNish’s improvised canvas and wood decking.
The Caird survives because the Norwegian sailors, descendants of Vikings, who took Shackleton from Stromness on the steam whaler Samson to Peggotty Camp to rescue McCarthy, McNish and Vincent, insisted on bringing back the boat as well.
That evening one white-haired veteran of the Southern Ocean held forth (in Norse) to Shackleton and his crew; with a dramatic gesture, he concluded, “These are men!”.
Frank Worsley brings the Caird on an open railway wagon to London, where it is cleaned up for exhibition.
Royal Albert Hall, London
9 December 1919
The first public projection of Hurley’s expedition film (later, South), narrated by Shackleton in person, with lantern slides and maps. Central: the James Caird story. The Times carried a detailed report.
Intended for the platform, the Caird was too wide for the doorways, remaining outside on a lorry. Shackleton gave box office proceeds to the Earl of Athlone’s Fund, Middlesex Hospital. Medical students dragged the Caird through the streets, soliciting donations, to the Middlesex Hospital Garden.
Two months later, the Caird was hoisted onto Selfridges’ roof for charity.
Shackleton later gave the James Caird to John Quiller Rowett, of the Shackleton-Rowett Quest expedition. In June 1922, shortly after Shackleton’s death, Rowett generously presented the James Caird to Dulwich College, their old school, on hearing they proposed a permanent Memorial.
Philharmonic Hall, Great Portland Street, London
December 1919
The Shackleton-Rowett 'Quest' Expedition, 1921-22
Restless at 47, Shackleton devised a new expedition, for scientific research and economic speculation, to the vast and mostly unexplored Beaufort Sea in the Canadian Arctic. The Royal Geographical Society and the Canadian government approved. He needs £50,000 and a ship.
Philanthropist John Quiller Rowett (1876-1924) promises Shackleton a large deposit. Rich from selling wine and spirits, he generously endowed hospitals, the Middlesex for dentistry; he bred pedigree livestock in Sussex, and was the benefactor of the Rowett Institute at the University of Aberdeen for animal nutrition research. In 1911 he had let Shackleton use his London office as a business address. Years ago, as schoolboys, they often walked together to Dulwich College over Sydenham Hill, in anxious dialogue about last night’s ‘prep’ - or homework - chiefly concerns around Greek and German. The prospectus named a cost of £100,000 (about £4-5 million today); Rowett funded everything, apart from what was given or lent and £5,000 from Frederick Becker; Hugh Robert Mill said “his generosity swelled to a splendid total”, which amounted to roughly £140,000.
He also wrote how Shackleton "went about his preparations with the heart of a boy, though old friends saw in his face signs of the wear and tear of his long years of unceasing hardship and toil".
When a new prime minister in Canada withdrew support for Shackleton’s scheme, he looked to the Antarctic again. He was overheard saying he wished he was young enough to try again the trans-continental crossing.
Shackleton bought the Norwegian ship Foca, a sealer of c.210 tons, renamed Quest by Emily. Just 111 feet long, her sides were two feet thick with steel-clad bows. She turned out to be slow and, with modifications made to her superstructure, not suited to the open ocean.
Men, equipment and supplies were got together in just three months.
The expedition proposed "oceanographic and sub-Antarctic exploration" to new sites on 3,000 miles of the Enderby Quadrant coastline and Peri-Antarctic Islands.
The Air Ministry asked Shackleton to assess sites for aerodrome and seaplane stations. He was also hoping to recover his fortunes, and mentioned ventures with coal, oil, phosphate nickel, guano, or fishing, whaling and sealing. He reputedly described to some friends a pearl lagoon in the South Seas on his way home.
He told The Times he would undertake magnetic readings, geological observations and coastal mapping; marine dredges and sounding apparatus were on board. A map showed a 30,000-mile route: Tristan da Cunha, Cape Town, Enderby Land, the Weddell Sea coast, South Georgia, New Zealand, various islands, and home.
"Romance will still cling to her errand" with "Lost Islands and Secret Seas".
Times correspondent
Recruiting for the expedition, he told his interviewer he hoped "for a happy family … a dozen men, chiefly those who had accompanied him on earlier expeditions". They came, with alacrity: Wild (Second in Command) and McIlroy, from their cotton farm in Nyasaland; Worsley, Macklin, Hussey, Charlie Green the cook, Alexander Kerr, Thomas McLeod, and James Dell, a messdeck friend from Discovery. (Ernest Joyce was not invited – he was still quarrelsome about unpaid wages from Endurance). The great Tom Crean would not abandon the South Pole Inn he had recently bought on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, at Anascaul.
Hubert Wilkins, from Australia, joined as naturalist; trained as an aerial photographer, he had edited Herbert Ponting’s Terra Nova film, The Great White Silence (1912). Two Scouts joined, selected from 1,700 applicants, and the first to join any polar expedition. The ‘shore party’, unusually, would also crew the ship.
At this time Shackleton would often quote his own modified version of lines from The Ship of Fools (1907) by St. John Lucas:
"We are the fools who could not rest
In the dull earth we left behind,
But burned with passion for the South
And drank strange frenzy from its wind.
The world where wise men live at ease
Fades from our unregretful eyes,
And blind across uncharted seas
We stagger on our enterprise."
There was great interest in the Quest ‘gadgets’: the Avro 554 ‘Antarctic’ Baby float-plane, adapted by Wilkins and Roderick Carr, the RAF pilot from New Zealand, for aerial exploration and photography. The plane was off-loaded during the voyage and sent to Cape Town to be collected later, and since the ship had to change course, the Avro Baby was never used. The crow’s nest had a heating system and electrically heated overalls, and the bridge an electric Kent Clear-view Screen against rain, spray and snow.
A 1957 biography of Shackleton calls Quest:
"the dividing line between what has become known as the 'Heroic Age' of Antarctic exploration and the 'Mechanical Age’."
Tower Pier, London
17 September 1921
Send-off: a London "triumphal progress", under the raised Tower Bridge, to a novel people’s choral symphony:
"… a perfect din" with "sirens of steamers" and "ringing cheers of thousands of Londoners …"
The Times
"Shackleton, who took a boyish delight in being made a fuss of, was delighted."
Frank Worsley
Problems with the engine meant a week at Lisbon. Shackleton diverted to Rio de Janeiro, for a month’s overhaul.
"It has been hell", Shackleton wrote to Emily.
In Rio he is thought to have had a heart attack. He would not be examined, saying he "fainted from the heat".
On the Christmas crossing to South Georgia, they endured what Shackleton claimed was the most frightful storm he ever experienced. Quest rolled 50 degrees to each side, with waves of 40-foot crest and trough.
"Much water came on board and found its way into Sir Ernest’s cabin and my own. The bunks were sodden, so much so that Sir Ernest left his and made up a bed on one of the benches in the wardroom, refusing to deprive any other man of his bunk. During the long spell of bad weather he had spent nearly the whole time on the bridge, and though I repeatedly suggested to him that he should lie down and rest, he would not do so. He took Worsley’s watch as well as his own, so that Worsley’s rest might not be disturbed. He was always doing little things like this for other people."
Frank Wild
Wild also described musical gatherings loved by "the Boss", "in the still nights off Rio outside the surgeon’s cabin whilst Hussey strummed tunes on his banjo". The five-stringed instrument had been rescued from the wrecked Endurance; Shackleton insisted (despite his ban on more than 2lb per man of personal possessions) that it was "vital mental medicine".
Death of Shackleton
5 January 1922, Grytviken Bay, South Georgia, aboard 'Quest'
Shackleton dies, aged 47, of a heart attack, a "very severe paroxysm" in his cabin at night, attended by Dr. Macklin. Just before his death Shackleton wrote in his diary about the "cheery" day he spent with the men.
In the days before his death, on the deck of the Quest, anchored off Grytviken, South Georgia, Shackleton had scrutinised with binoculars the icy mountains he and the others first came over "on our 1916 tramp across S.G. from King Haakon Bay", pointing out the route they took to the men.
He writes in his diary:
"Anxiety has been deeply probing into me … I wonder what internal difficulty will be sprung on me … I pray that the furnace will hold out.
Things have gone awry: engines unreliable, furnace cracked, water short; heavy gales; all that physically can go wrong but the spirit of all on board sound & good.
Ah me: the years that have gone since in the pride of young manhood I first went forth to the fight. I grow old and tired but must always lead on."
He inscribed a favourite slogan from Browning:
"There are two points in the adventures of the diver,
One when a beggar he prepares to plunge,
One when a prince he rises with his pearl."
The men were to have a Christmas celebration on the very next day, to make up for the bully beef sandwiches and cocoa of Christmas Day itself in the dreadful gale; Mr and Mrs Rowett had sent along tinned ham, turkey and plum puddings.
Christmas perhaps brought to mind these lines from Browning’s poem Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day he wrote down on the same page:
"Thankful that I can
Be crossed and thwarted as a man."
A few hours before his death, on the night of 4 January, Shackleton writes:
"In the darkening twilight I saw a lone star hover, gem-like above the bay."
The bright star he noted in his diary on the night he died has recently been identified as Jupiter (by Professor Stuart Malin, taking into account both date and location).
The expedition continues under Frank Wild’s command
Hussey was chosen to accompany Shackleton’s body to Montevideo, en route to a national funeral in London. He waited to hear from Lady Shackleton. She chose South Georgia as his resting place, beneath the mountains Shackleton had been the first to cross.
Wild was now in command; he elected to carry on. On 4 February 1922, seeking the Enderby Land coast as planned, Quest entered the Antarctic pack ice, the smallest of expedition ships to do so by that date. The farthest south Quest reached was 69° 18’ S, 17° 11’ E, in the Enderby Quadrant, after which she progressed slowly north and westwards.
Beset in ice briefly in the Weddell Sea during March, Wild took Quest to Elephant Island, ostensibly to collect sea-elephant blubber for fuel.
Recalling his time marooned on the island eight years earlier with 21 others, Wild thought about the "indomitable will" of Shackleton, "who had overcome every obstacle and surmounted each difficulty as it arose". He contemplated the narrow beach fringed with rocks where they landed and how Shackleton "lay down on the shingle and had his first sleep for eight days".
Approaching Cape Wild, they saw the camp site but were unable to land.
"What memories the sight … revives … the boat journey, the last bad night, the landing at Valentine, the row to Cape Wild, the subsequent miseries & the long sojourn on Wild spit. We have stood gazing with binoculars picking out & recognizing old familiar spots, each reminiscent of some incident which we recall by saying ‘do you remember the rock we nearly got washed up on, there it is just coming into view etc.’. Few of us thought when we left it last that it would ever be our fate to see it again.
Ah what memories what memories! – they rush to one like a great flood & bring tears to ones eyes, & as I sit & try to write a great rush of feeling comes over me & I find I cannot express myself or what I feel. Once more I see the little boat, Frankie Wild’s hut dark & dirty, but a snug little shelter all the same. Once more I see the old faces & hear the old voices – old friends scattered everywhere. But to express all I feel is impossible."
Macklin in his diary
Returning to South Georgia on 6 April, met by Hussey, they learned that Shackleton was now buried there. Able Seaman Thomas McLeod, the “deep-sea salt” from Stornoway in the Western Isles and veteran of Endurance, suggested he and the other Quest men make together a memorial cairn with a cross, on the lower slopes of Duse Fell at Hope Point, the headland that overlooks Grytviken Harbour; their ceremonial actions, in severe snow, preserved on film (restored by the British Film Institute), resemble the burial of an Anglo-Saxon chief.
"No one grudged the labour and time spent, for it was the last job we would do for the Boss."
Frank Wild
Hussey took the first available ship home to London, having no heart left for the expedition, and wanting to get on with his medical studies.
In May they stopped at Tristan da Cunha, Inaccessible Island, Nightingale Island and finally Gough Island before heading to Cape Town. There they received instructions from Rowett’s agent to come home.
After the Quest expedition no more were organised in Antarctica for seven years.
Shackleton after Endurance, 1917-1922 is the sixth 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, displayed 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 Jools Cole.
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 | Dr 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