South

Table of Contents

 

 

SOUTH

SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON is regarded as perhaps the greatest of all Antarctic explorers. Born in 1874 in County Kildare, he was apprenticed in the Merchant Navy and became a junior officer under Scott during the 1901-4 expedition to the South Pole. In 1907 he led his own expedition on the whaler
Nimrod,
coming within ninety-seven miles of the South Pole, the feat for which he was knighted. The events of that expedition are chronicled in his first book,
The Heart of the Antarctic.
His heroic reputation was made during the ill-fated
Endurance
expedition, during which he led his men to safety after being marooned for two years on the polar ice.
South
is his recounting of this expedition. He died in 1922 during his fourth Antarctic expedition and was buried in the whalers’ cemetery on South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic.

 

FERGUS FLEMING is the author of
Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps; Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole;
and
Barrow’s Boys.

PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann 1919
First published in the United States of America by Macmillan Publishing 1920
This edition with an introduction by Fergus Fleming published in Penguin Books (U.K.) 2002
Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 2004

Introduction copyright © Fergus Fleming, 2002

All rights reserved
Photographs copyright © Royal Geography Society, London
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Schackleton, Ernest Henry, Sir 1874-1922
South : the
Endurance
expedition / Ernest Shackleton; introduction by Fergus Fleming;
photographs by Frank Hurley
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
Originally published: London : W. Heinemann, 1919.

eISBN : 978-0-142-43779-7

 

 

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Introduction

On 8 August 1914 Ernest Shackleton left Plymouth aboard the polar research vessel
Endurance,
bound for the South Pole. For many years he had coveted the earth’s southern axis—in 1908 he had sledged to within 100 miles of the spot, discovering en route the South Magnetic Pole—but it was no longer a goal that could be sought in its own right. Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott had already captured it in 1911-12. Shackleton, however, sought to outstrip his forestallers (a word much favored by the polar fraternity) with a feat of breathtaking audacity. As leader of the Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition he planned not only to reach the Pole but to cross from one side of Antarctica to the other. He and his transcontinental party were to battle through the ice-choked Weddell Sea aboard the
Endurance,
while a support ship, the
Aurora,
would attack via the Ross Sea. When both teams had landed they would dissect the continent with ferocity, Shackleton and his men advancing from one side while the
Aurora
team laid anticipatory food depots on the other. Meanwhile, scientists from both ships were to fan out and investigate their immediate environs. If all went well, Shackleton hoped to come home in 1915 with the most comprehensive scientific and topographical analysis of Antarctica to date, a sensational attainment of the Pole, and the news that the Union Jack flapped resolutely at the bottom of the world.

“In the
Endurance,
” he wrote, “I had centered ambitions, hopes, and desires.” How, then, he must have been disappointed when his ship foundered in the Weddell Sea, forcing him to abandon his odyssey and subsequently to make one of the most harrowing escapes in the history of exploration. How, too, he must have been demoralized when, on his return, he had to relive the experience. From December 1919 to May 1920, at the Philharmonic Hall in Great Portland Street, he lectured twice daily on his calamitous foray; and as he spoke, Frank Hurley’s film of the expedition flickered silently on the screen behind him. Possibly it was the most memorable show-and-tell in history. Shackleton, however, found it uncomfortable. Twice a day, he had to revisit the disastrous culmination of his ambitions and desires; and not only revisit it but explain it, set it in context, delve into each unpalatable detail of a voyage that, despite its heroic outcome, had been an expensive and disappointing failure. It might have been easier if those to whom he lectured were present to deliver some form of judgment, to appreciate his humiliation, or, at best, to show a degree of interest greater than that of mere attendance. But he did not even have that consolation. Most of the time the Philharmonic Hall was only half-filled. People were devastatingly unconcerned.

Shackleton belonged to the Age of Heroes, a period stretching from 1888 to 1914, in which individuals, financed privately or otherwise, assumed the burden of polar exploration that had previously been borne by government. The appellation is apt for it was indeed an age when heroism ran amok. Men pursued, in the words of more than one explorer, “something big,” the size of the exploit being seen as a measure of one’s spiritual and physical worth in an increasingly humdrum industrial world. The poles were “big” and explorers therefore went after them. The roll call included Nansen, Abruzzi, Andrée, and Peary in the Arctic; Scott, Amundsen, Mawson, and Shackleton in the south. Their travails, and on occasion their deaths, were followed with avidity by a sensation-hungry public. But the concept of heroism evaporated in the trenches of the First World War. When Shackleton sailed for the Antarctic in 1914, he could still be a hero. When he returned in 1917 he could not. The war had produced a surfeit of suffering against which his antics were of piffling importance. When, for example, the
Aurora
cabled for assistance in 1916, Winston Churchill’s response was—understandably—negative. “When all the sick and wounded have been tended,” he wrote, “when all their impoverished & broken hearted homes have been restored, when every hospital is gorged with money, & every charitable subscription is closed, then & not till then wd. I concern myself with these penguins. I suppose however something will have to be done.” In post-war Britain nobody wanted to hear about heroism. When Shackleton mounted the podium at the half-empty Philharmonic Hall, he must have been aware that he was a man from the past.

These were the circumstances in which
South
was written, and, to some extent, they inform its content. From its dedication—“To MY COMRADES who fell in the white warfare of the south and on the red fields of France and Flanders”—to its explanations as to why the expedition sailed south instead of joining the war, and how its members fared on their return (three were killed in action and five were wounded), one can sense Shackleton’s discomfort at being placed so immediately in historical context. What was his story worth against those of Passchendaele and the Somme? The marvel of
South,
however, is that it is not written as a story. It is, instead, an explorer’s journal that describes conditions as accurately as possible for the benefit of those to come. When writing about the Weddell Sea ice trap, the movement of ice, the flow of currents, the direction of winds, and the availability of food, Shackleton seeks not to entertain but to inform. When describing the mechanics of his stove, the lack of water, the blizzards and the shiny emptiness of the pack, he does so baldly. He annotates the moves from Dump Camp to Ocean Camp to Patience Camp in plain terms. His voyage to South Georgia aboard the
James Caird
is related with restraint—despite surviving a wave so massive that at first sight he mistook its crest for clear sky on the horizon. Only on his final trek across South Georgia with Crean and Worsley, over mountains that had never been climbed before, does he titillate. Who was the famous fourth man who paced in the shadow of their consciousness? Was he a figment of their exhaustion or was he, as all three felt, Christ? The image was so strong that it found its way into T. S. Eliot’s
Wasteland.
Characteristically, Shackleton covers it in a few, brusque lines.