Ernest Shackleton

Shackleton's family

Shackleton as a young man

Shackleton on the ice

Shackleton's grave

Off to sea
Romantic, ambitious, handsome and strong, Shackleton preferred the idea of going to sea than into medical practice and joined the merchant navy when he was 16. His first voyage included a memorable rounding of Cape Horn in winter: 'one continuous blizzard all the way', he recalled later. His captain reckoned he'd never come across such an 'obstinate boy'.

He qualified as a master mariner eight years later in 1898. His years at sea took him to Japan, America and South Africa, but he dreamed of exploring the poles. In 1900, he co-authored O.H.M.S, a book about his experience of transporting British troops to fight in the Boer War.

Polar ambitions
Keen for glory, Shackleton's first polar experience was aboard Discovery as third lieutenant in charge of provisions on Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition of 1901-4. He was one of the three members who journeyed over the Ross ice shelf by sledge, but was invalided home with scurvy in 1903. The following year, he married Emily Dorman, one of his sisters' friends, and they subsequently had three children.

After leaving maritime service in 1904, he did a stint as a journalist before being elected to the full-time post of secretary of the Scottish Royal Geographical Society. In 1906, he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal-Unionist in Dundee, then joined an engineering firm in Glasgow. But he was already preparing for his next journey south.

In 1908, he returned to the Antarctic as leader of his own expedition, with the whaling ship Nimrod. His sledging party made it to within 97 miles of the South Pole, the furthest south anyone had been, despite being ill-equipped with ponies instead of trained dogs. Faced with blizzards and dwindling rations, Shackleton turned back short of his goal to save his men's lives. However, the expedition did result in the claiming of the Victoria Land plateau for Britain, and Shackleton received a knighthood on his return. His dictated account, The Heart of the Antarctic, was published in 1909.

Fame and endurance
Sir Ernest's third - and most famous - trip was in 1914 as leader of the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (see The story). The plan was to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea via the pole, a distance of some 1,800 miles, but before the explorers could land on the continent, their ship Endurance was crushed in the pack ice, trapping them for 15 months.

Optimism and good leadership saw Shackleton and his men through a remarkable feat of endurance. 'He never appears to be anything but the acme of good humour and hopefulness,' wrote one of the expedition's scientists, Thomas Orde-Lees, in his diary. When the Endurance sank, Shackleton jettisoned his gold watch and sovereigns as an example to the others.

Shackleton never forgot his responsibility to his other, largely forgotten Antarctic team - the men who had been given the (ultimately useless) task of laying food depots along the Ross ice shelf towards the South Pole, which would have been consumed by the expedition if it had successfully landed. He returned to Antarctica via New Zealand and rescued what remained of the Ross Sea party - in this instance, three of the men had died.

On his return to Britain, Shackleton was restless and began drinking too much: 'frivolously boyish' was one acquaintance's opinion of his behaviour. He found domestic life stifling and veered between irritability and remorse. He was sent on a war propaganda mission to Buenos Aires, unsuccessfully trying to persuade Argentina and Chile to forsake neutrality and enter the war with the Allies. Then in 1918 he headed an undercover expedition to establish a British presence in the far north of neutral Norway (where he had a suspected heart attack). Finally, following the Armistice in November, he became 'staff officer in charge of Arctic equipment' during the Allies' war against the Bolsheviks in the new Soviet Union, remaining in Murmansk as little more than a glorified storekeeper. Most of the time in between he lived at the Mayfair home of his mistress, American divorcée Rosalind Chetwynd. South, his account of the Endurance escapade, was published in 1919 and he hit the lecture circuit with tales of the ordeal.

He organised a fourth trip to Antarctica with the ship Quest, but its purpose, ostensibly to circumnavigate the continent, was vague and Shackleton was noticeably unwell. 'The Boss says · quite frankly that he does not know what he will do after S[outh] Georgia,' wrote the ship's doctor, Alexander Macklin, at the end of 1921.

On 5 January 1922, at the start of the journey, Shackleton died of a heart attack on the Quest off South Georgia and was buried on the island. He was 47.