One hundred years ago, the leader of the last great expedition of the heroic age of polar exploration died from a heart attack as his ship, Quest, headed for Antarctica. The announcement of the death of Ernest Shackleton on 30 January 1922 was greeted with an outpouring of national grief.
This was the man, after all, who had saved the entire crew of his ship Endurance – which had been crushed and sunk by ice in 1915 – by making a daring trip in a tiny open boat over 750 miles of polar sea to raise the alarm at a whaling station in South Georgia.
It remains one of the greatest rescue stories of modern history and led to the lionising of Shackleton in the United Kingdom, a reputation that survived intact for the rest of the century. As his contemporary Raymond Priestley, the geologist and Antarctic explorer, later put it: “When disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”
Now the centenary of his death is being marked with a lavishly illustrated exhibition – Shackleton’s legacy and the power of early Antarctic photography – which opens at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), in London on Monday and which includes a range of images and artefacts from his expeditions. In addition, a digitally remastered version of South, a documentary film – one of the first ever made – of Shackleton’s 1914-16 Endurance expedition is being screened at the British Film Institute in London.
The film and most of the exhibition’s finest images are the handiwork of Frank Hurley, who sailed with Shackleton and who was one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers and film-makers. Both film and exhibition feature striking camera work and provide vivid accounts of the privations that Shackleton and his men endured as they headed off to explore Antarctica.
Born in Ireland and raised in south London, Shackleton first visited the south pole when he served on the 1901-03 Discovery expedition led by Robert Scott. Shackleton later returned with his own expedition, on the Nimrod, and led a four-man party that got within 100 miles of the pole in January 1909.
And here, poised on the threshold of greatness, Shackleton turned back his party as his calculations suggested his men had insufficient rations to ensure a safe return. He was right. As they staggered back towards their base camp, over the Beardmore glacier, they began to suffer from bitter cold, endured near starvation and were left with their clothes in tatters.
“It is neck or nothing with us now … Our food lies ahead and death stalks us from behind,” Shackleton wrote in his diary. His men just made it but would certainly have perished had they ploughed on to reach the pole that had been only a short distance away. As the RGS exhibition notes, Shackleton’s decision was courageous.
Two years later, two expeditions reached the south pole. The first party to arrive was led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. The second was directed by Scott – whose party perished as they tried to get back to base camp.
Not to be outdone, Shackleton devised an even more ambitious reason for returning to Antarctica. He would lead an expedition that would traverse the entire continent, a proposal that was derided by Winston Churchill, then first lord of the Admiralty. “Enough money has been spent on this sterile quest,” he told Shackleton, in an exchange highlighted in the RGS exhibition. “The pole has already been discovered.”
Shackleton replied that “death is a very little thing and knowledge very great … and really Regents [sic] Street holds more dangers than the 5 million square miles that constitute the Antarctic continent”. His confidence was misplaced as events transpired although his argument prevailed. Endurance set off, in August 1914, from West India Docks in London, just as war was declared with Germany. (Shackleton offered to turn back to help Britain’s war effort but was allowed to proceed.)
By January 1915, the ship had reached the Weddell Sea where some of the worst pack ice ever recorded began to slow down the Endurance until, on the 19th, she could go no further. The ship and her crew were trapped.
Shackleton set up a camp on the ice and for months he and his men waited in the hope that it might melt and eventually free the Endurance. At the same time, Hurley set about taking some of the most dramatic photographs in the history of 20th-century polar exploration, including stunning backlit images of the imprisoned, ice-covered Endurance.
“It was pitch dark and Hurley was allowed to set up flares around the ship,” said Alasdair MacLeod, curator of the RGS exhibition. “These flares were sequenced to go off at exactly the same moment that Hurley pressed his camera shutter. But when they went off he was temporarily blinded by the light and stumbled into the ice.
“However, the depictions he produced are probably among the most iconic in the history of photography.” Looming out of the ice, its masts and rigging glowing against the black Antarctic night, the images also provide the RGS exhibition with its most dramatic highlights.
Then, in October, the ice eventually cracked the Endurance’s hull and she began to sink. Shackleton abandoned ship and he and his 27 men piled on to the ice. The sled dogs that the crew had lovingly tended for more than a year, and the ship’s cat, Mrs Chippy, were shot and the men took to their ship’s three lifeboats, eventually reaching the uninhabited Elephant Island on 15 April, more than a year since they had last stood on dry land.
The party were far from safety, however. Elephant Island is bleak and inhospitable and was far from shipping routes. So Shackleton and five others, including the Endurance’s captain Frank Worsley, took to the sea again in one of its lifeboats – the James Caird – and set sail for the whaling station at Stromness on South Georgia 750 miles away.
After 15 days at sea, in the face of hurricane-force winds, their little open boat reached South Georgia – thanks to Worsley’s considerable navigation skills. All that separated the men – who were suffering from cold or frostbite – from the island’s whaling station were the mountains of South Georgia. With only a 50-yard stretch of rope to link them, Shackleton, Worsley and a third crewman, Tom Crean, traversed the range in 36 hours – and were able to raise the alarm at the whaling station on 20 May 1916. No one had crossed the island before they made that trip.
Shackleton returned to Elephant Island on 30 August on the Chilean ocean-going tug Yelcho and evacuated his men – who had survived by eating penguin and seal flesh. Back in England, Shackleton volunteered for the army and later served with the North Russia Expeditionary Force, advising on the training of British forces in Arctic conditions.
He still yearned for another trip to Antarctica, however, and after long negotiations set sail in Quest, from England, with the aim of circumnavigating Antarctica. Shackleton was by now very ill and had suffered at least one heart attack. On 2 January 1922, he wrote in his diary: “I grow old and tired but must always lead on.” Three days later he had a major heart attack and died a few hours later. He is buried on South Georgia, scene of his greatest triumph.
“Shackleton was an inspirational leader,” added MacLeod. “He had an innate sense of what was possible and achievable. He also had a huge personality but led by example. At the same time, he was sensitive to the needs of the individuals he was leading. For example, after Endurance broke up, his men had lost their protection and shelter. Their social fabric had been destroyed. There would have been dissent. Yet Shackleton succeeded in keeping them together and made sure they survived.”
