Ernest Shackleton

Ernest Shackleton was born in Ireland, raised in south London, and went to sea at sixteen on a merchant ship that took him to the Far East and South America. He joined Robert Scott’s first Antarctic expedition in 1901, got sick on the long sledge journey and was sent home early, which stung enough that he spent the next decade arranging his own trips back.

On his Nimrod expedition of 1908 he got within ninety-seven miles of the South Pole before turning back, and wrote to his wife that he would rather be a live donkey than a dead lion. When Amundsen reached the pole in 1911, Shackleton announced the last great object left: to cross the whole Antarctic continent on foot. He put to sea in the Endurance in 1914, with a crew of twenty-seven and a ship the men had named for his family motto, by endurance we conquer.

The ship never reached land. Pack ice closed on it in the Weddell Sea, held it all winter and crushed it. The men camped on drifting floes for months, then took to three lifeboats and reached a bare rock island called Elephant Island, where nobody would ever look for them. Shackleton and five men sailed one of the boats, the James Caird, eight hundred miles across the worst ocean in the world to South Georgia, then walked over its unmapped mountains to a whaling station. Four months later he went back for the rest. All twenty-seven came home.

He died in 1922, aged forty-seven, of a heart attack aboard the Quest at the very start of another Antarctic voyage, in the harbour at South Georgia. His wife had him buried there among the whalers’ church and the hills he had crossed once on foot, and the crew who had come with him raised the cross that still stands above the grave.

The crossing he planned was never made. What stayed instead was the standard he set, and the way his men described it afterwards: the expedition failed completely, the ship was lost, and every single man came home alive. For a hundred years, businesses and navies and expeditions have used the advertisement he is remembered for, the one he is supposed to have put in the papers looking for men for a hazardous journey.