Shackleton - Polar Explorer

 

Sir Earnest Shackleton's trans-Antarctic expedition arrived at South Georgia in Endurance during the opening months of the First World War in late 1914. Already a notable polar explorer having opened the way for Scott and Amundsen to reach the South Pole he now planned an audacious crossing of the Antarctic continent starting in the north. A separate team was already starting to lay depots from the southern edge of the continent to the South Pole.

Shackleton and his crew stayed on South Georgia for a month preparing for his arduous ordeals ahead. Despite the whalers of South Georgia warning Shackleton that his route to the northern edge of the Antarctic continent was likely to be barred by unusually heavy concentrations of ice that had arrived that year he sailed for the Weddell Sea in December. In late December Endurance, with Frank Worsley as Captain, was beset in the ice. The ice held her tight for the next 18 months as it revolved slowly around the Weddell Sea. Then as it started to break up the pressure became too much and Endurance gave into the will of the ice as it crushed her. She sank marooning Shackleton and his 28 men on the ice.

Under Shackleton's firm and steady leadership he camped his men on the ice for 5 months and then led them in 3 open boats, in appalling conditions, dodging huge ice flows to the inhospitable Elephant Island, the last fragment of dry land, before the open South Atlantic and certain death. He then took one boat, the James Caird, covered it with canvas and sailed it with 5 men from Elephant Island 850 miles through treacherous and mountainous seas for 16 days to arrive, in a violent storm, on the southern side of South Georgia at King Haarkon Bay.

Exhausted, they narrowly negotiated a landing and crawled ashore at Cape Rosa on 9 May 1916. Safety and rescue lay on the north side of the island in the whaling stations. Leaving 3 of his crew under the upturned James Caird, Shackleton with Tom Crean and Frank Worsley set off with minimal equipment (primus, binoculars, compass, an adze and 90feet of rope) at 3 am on Friday 19th May and crossed the previously unexplored interior of South Georgia by going hard for 36 hours and covered some 22 statute miles by the crow flies of previously unexplored desolate and inhospitable terrain.

Shackleton returned to South Georgia in 1922 in the Quest to circumnavigate the Antarctic Continent. He was accompanied by some of his old crew from Endurance. He died of a heart attack on board Quest while anchored in Grytviken Bay. He is buried in the small cemetery that over looks the bay. His crew put up a cross in his memory at Hope Point.