The Incredible Survival Story of Ernest Shackleton

The Makings of an Explorer

Ernest Shackleton was born on 15th February 1874 to an Anglo-Irish family in County Kildare, Ireland. When he was 10, he moved to London. Ignoring his father’s wish that he would become a doctor, Shackleton joined the merchant navy when he was just sixteen. The high seas became his home, but there was one place that he became fixated on: the South Pole.

In 1901, Shackleton was chosen as one of the men who would board Robert Falcon Scott’s ship Discovery and explore Antarctica. It was the chance of a lifetime. However, things didn’t go well. Conditions were awful, and Shackleton fell ill with frostbite and scurvy. He also suffered from snowblindness. The ship’s doctor deemed him too weak to continue, and Shackleton was sent home. It wasn’t the successful trip he’d envisioned, but a fire had been ignited in his belly.

Nimrod: Shackleton’s Maiden Voyage

It took Shackleton another seven years to return to exploring. In the years between expeditions, he married, had a child, was elected secretary of the Scottish Royal Geographical Society, and unsuccessfully ran for parliament. But the sea always held a special place in his heart. On August 7th, 1907, Shackleton and his crew left London aboard The Nimrod, headed to Antarctica. Five months later, the expedition party reached the southernmost point any human had travelled to. Though he failed to reach the actual pole, Shackleton was knighted on his return to England.

Two years later, in 1911, Norwegian Roald Amundsen became the first man to reach the South Pole. Shackleton had been beaten.

Endurance: Crossing the Continent

As a new challenge, Shackleton set his sights on crossing the Antarctic continent on foot, but the second expedition was fraught with troubles from the start. After the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Serbia, war in Europe seemed imminent. Fearing that his crew and funding may be requisitioned to aid the war effort, Shackleton appealed directly to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to let the expedition proceed. The wait was excruciating. Then, days after the outbreak of World War I, he received Churchill’s reply. The telegram contained one word: Proceed!

The Endurance set sail on August 8th, 1914. As the ship neared Antarctica in January of 1915, it encountered difficulty in the Weddell Sea and became trapped in pack ice. There it remained for nearly the entire year. Shackleton and his men lived on the ship, hunting seals for food and racing huskies on the ice to keep themselves entertained. But, in October 1915, a mass of ice ripped the sternpost from the deck. Water poured into the ship through broken timber. The pumps were manned around the clock, with the men refusing to give up, but all for naught. Shackleton ordered the men off the ship—after months of battle, the ice had won.

Escape: A Battle to Survive

The men languished on a vast iceberg for five months, drifting away from Antarctica. When they could finally launch the lifeboats, they set course for Elephant Island—a spit of land in the outer reaches of the South Shetland Islands in the Southern Ocean. They landed on April 16, 1916, and the ship's doctors attempted to treat their various ailments—frostbite and gangrene were rife.

Fed and watered, Shackleton set out the next part of their plan. A smaller crew of six would journey to the much bigger island of South Georgia, 800 miles away. It would be treacherous—potentially a suicide mission—but what choice did they have?

On April 24th 1916, the James Caird was launched from Elephant Island with six men, including Shackleton, aboard. They had to cross Drake’s Passage, the most feared stretch of ocean on the globe, to reach their destination. Here, winds could reach up to 200 miles per hour. The waves, too, were legendary, reaching 80 or 90 feet. 

The weather is bad. It's raining; it's cloudy. He can't see the sky. He can't see the stars in order to do navigation readings. He's trying to find South Georgia Island, not a very big island. If they miss it, that's it. Shackleton knows not only is he and the five guys on the boat dead, the guys on Elephant Island are probably going to be dead as well. So he's got this fearsome weight of responsibility on him.

Dr Stephanie Barczewski, author of Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton and the Changing Face of Heroism. 

Against all odds, they landed in South Georgia on May 9th, 1916. Three and a half months later, on his fourth attempt, Shackleton successfully rescued the remaining 22 crew members on Elephant Island on August 30th, 1916. The entire crew survived.

Quest: The Final Expedition

In 1920, Shackleton announced his plans to return to Antarctica for a fourth time. He wished to circumnavigate the continent and planned to investigate some lost islands. The ship Quest left England on September 24th, 1921 and arrived in Brazil in early 1922. Here, Shackleton suffered a heart attack but refused to be seen by a doctor. Instead, he set sail for South Georgia.

On 5th January 1922, Shackleton summoned the ship’s doctor to his cabin. He was suffering unbearable pain in his face and back. Though the doctor did what he could, his condition worsened. Shackleton began convulsing, and despite the doctor’s best attempts to save him, he died of heart failure at 47 years old.

On March 5th, 1922, Ernest Shackleton was buried in South Georgia. Among the handful of mourners were his few dear friends from the Endurance. In his diary, the doctor wrote: "This is as the Boss would have had it himself. Standing lonely on an island far from civilisation, surrounded by stormy and tempestuous seas and in the vicinity of one of his greatest exploits.”

A fitting legacy for one of Britain’s greatest-ever explorers.