Ernest Shackleton
1874 – 1922 · United Kingdom
Known for: Antarctic explorer who brought every man of the Endurance expedition home alive
“I hold that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life's set prize.”
Biography
Ernest Shackleton was born on 15 February 1874 at Kilkea in County Kildare, Ireland, the second of ten children of Henry Shackleton, a landowner who gave up the land to study medicine, and Henrietta Gavan. The family moved to Dublin in 1880 and four years later to Sydenham in south London. He read voraciously as a boy and was, by his own account, a thoroughly bored pupil at Dulwich College. At sixteen he was allowed to go to sea, apprenticed before the mast on the square rigged Hoghton Tower, and worked his way up to master mariner by 1898, qualified to command a British ship anywhere in the world.
Shackleton first saw the Antarctic as third officer on Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery expedition of 1901 to 1904, marching with Scott and Edward Wilson to a new southern record of 82 degrees south before being sent home on health grounds. He returned in command of the Nimrod expedition of 1907 to 1909, brought three companions to 88 degrees 23 minutes south, within 97 geographical miles of the South Pole and the largest advance toward it yet made, and turned back rather than lose his men; another of his parties climbed Mount Erebus. King Edward VII knighted him on his return. After Amundsen reached the pole in December 1911, Shackleton set out to cross the continent from sea to sea, and the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 to 1917 became instead a long improvisation for survival. Endurance was caught in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea and sank on 21 November 1915; the men camped on the floes until they broke up, took to the lifeboats for Elephant Island, and Shackleton then sailed 720 nautical miles of the South Atlantic in an open boat to reach South Georgia and fetch rescue.
Every member of the party came home alive. Away from the ice his life was less orderly: the business ventures with which he hoped to make himself secure came to nothing, and he died heavily in debt. He went south once more with the Shackleton-Rowett expedition in 1921 and died of a heart attack on 5 January 1922 aboard his ship at South Georgia. At the request of his wife, Emily, he was buried in the cemetery at Grytviken, on the island from which he had once set out to save his crew. His reputation faded for decades behind Scott's before he was rediscovered as a model of leadership in extremity. The wreck of Endurance was found on the floor of the Weddell Sea a little over a century after his death.