Sir Ernest Shackleton

11/12/2016

The story I’m about to tell took place during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration in the early 1900s.

Perhaps one of the elementary students can tell us where Antarctica is?

Antarctica is very cold, often the temperatures dip to -60F with howling winds. That would make a winter day in Jackson feel warm by comparison!

The story I’m about to tell took place during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration in the early 1900s.

Perhaps one of the elementary students can tell us where Antarctica is?

Antarctica is very cold, often the temperatures dip to -60F with howling winds. That would make a winter day in Jackson feel warm by comparison!

Why was this age called “Heroic”? Well, one hundred-twenty years ago nobody had ever been across Antarctica. This was many decades before modern equipment and clothing. Explorers did not wear Gore-Tex or down jackets. Instead they had wool coats. In the first twenty years of Antarctic exploration, many men died.

There is one man, however, who kept his crew alive when complete disaster struck. This man’s name was Sir Ernest Shackleton.

Shackleton was born in Ireland in 1874. He was a strong student, but he longed for adventure. He went to sea at 16, and eventually became a merchant navy officer.

Then in 1901, and again 1907, Shackleton went on two Antarctic ventures called the Discovery Expedition and the Nimrod Expedition. In each of these, he and his men almost starved and froze to death, but they also set foot on places nobody had ever seen. They climbed Mt. Erebus, an active volcano over 12,000 feet tall. They saw towering structures of windswept ice, vast fields of snow, and glittering glaciers.

Right after Shackleton returned to England, a Norwegian explorer named Roald Amundsen led the first team ever to reach the South Pole. Shackleton wanted to surpass this feat. He also wanted to collect scientific data on the climate and photograph the breathtakingly beautiful landscapes, so he came up with idea of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The plan was to be the first team ever to go across the whole landmass of Antarctica.

Shackleton hired his team in a unique way. Often his interviews were only a couple questions. For example, he asked the physicist Reginald James, “Can you sing?” Some of the men he hired because he liked the way they looked or talked. These were men who had to rely on each other for their lives! But he was a very good judge of character, as it turns out.

The voyage set out in 1914. The ship was called the Endurance. This name was very fitting. The expedition was a test of human endurance. In fact, the Endurance never even reached Antarctica! It became trapped solid in ice as it was sailing towards the mainland. Eventually the ice pressed on the sides of the ship so hard that Shackleton ordered the men to abandon ship and camp on the ice beside it. They drifted, locked in a huge slab of ice, for two months. When spring came, the Endurance sank, and the men had to board small rowboats and sail to the nearest island 300 miles away called Elephant Island. It was a windswept and frozen rock, inhabited only by a few seals. No ships ever came past. They would die soon when food ran out. Shackleton had to decide what to do next.

He took a 22-foot rowboat and five men. They rowed across the most vicious sea in the world, 750 miles!, without modern navigational equipment, through hurricane-force winds. Finally they reached sight of South Georgia Island, the southernmost inhabited place in the world, a whaling station.

But there was a problem. The men had landed on the South part of the island, and the whaling port was in the North. The seas were too rough to get back in the boat. Shackleton made the decision to go across the island. No one had ever done this before. Tall mountain peaks and deep crevasses of ice laid in their path. The men only had boots with some nails in the soles, a few simple tools, and 50ft. of rope.

Through sheer endurance, Shackleton led his men across the ice fields and down the mountains as the dangerously cold night was setting in. When he got to the whaling port, he didn’t take time to rest, but immediately fitted a ship to rescue the rest of his crew waiting for him on Elephant Island.

Shackleton’s leadership and cheerfulness kept the men enduring through seemingly impossible deadly obstacles; and the men he had left on Elephant Island knew they could expect him to return for them. When the rescue boat came within earshot, he called out, “Are you all well?” the call came back from his friend Frank Wild, “All safe, boss! All well!”

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Sir Ernest Shackleton

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