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Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was an
Anglo Irish Antarctic explorer, best
known for leading the Endurance
expedition of 1914 to 1916. Ernest
Shackleton was born on the 15th of
February in 1874, in county killed
Dari Ireland. He grew up the son of a
doctor, who expected him to follow in
his father's footsteps. The family
moved to Sydenham in suburban South
London when Shackleton was ten years
old and was to be educated.

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Despite his father's pressure to
become a doctor, he rejected the
notion and joined the Merchant Navy
at the age of 16 and eventually
qualified as a Master Mariner by the
year 1898. He would travel widely and
eventually develop a keen interest in
exploring the poles. In 1901,
Shackleton was chosen to go on the
Discovery expedition led by British
naval officer Robert Falcon Scott
with the goal of exploring the
Antarctic and penetrating the
southern interior of the frozen
continent, which had yet to be set
foot on by man.

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With Scott and one other Shackleton
trek towards the South Pole in
tremendously challenging conditions,
marching to a latitude of 82 degrees
south, getting closer to the Pole
than any other group had before.
Unfortunately Shackleton became
seriously ill and had to return home
early. However, he had gained
valuable experience that would prove
crucial a decade or so later.

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Back in Britain, Shackleton pass the
time working as a journalist. He was
later elected secretary of the
Scottish Royal Geographical Society
and in 1906 he unsuccessfully
attempted to enter parliament in
Dundee. All the while, however, his
mind stayed focus on returning to the
southern pole, where his heart
remained.

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His next chance to sail south was in
1908, when he returned to the
Antarctic as the leader of his very
own expedition, on a ship named
Nimrod. During the expedition his
team climbed Mount Airbus, the most
active volcano in Antarctica, made
numerous important scientific
discoveries and set a further record
by coming even closer to the South
Pole than before, reaching a latitude
of 88 degrees south ,a mere 180
kilometres from the South Pole.

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His achievement didn't go unnoticed
and upon return to Britain he was
knighted by King Edward the seventh.
Needless to say, Ernest Shackleton
wasn't the only adventurous explorer
with his eyes firmly fixed on the
prize of being the first to reach the
South Pole. Between December 1911 and
January 1912, Norwegian explorer
Roald Amundsen, leading his South
Pole expedition, and Brit Robert
Falcon Scott, leading the Terra Nova
expedition, found themselves in a
fierce race to be the first to step
foot at the South Pole. Although both
teams successfully made it there,
Amundsen's team beat Scots to the
punch by five weeks.

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That would have been a real kick in
the guts when Scott and his four
companions saw the Norwegian flag
already erected there. Tragically,
Scott and all of his team perished on
the return journey. Shackleton took
the news on the chin unperturbed and
in 1914 made his third trip to the
Antarctic on the ship Endurance. This
time, planning to be the first
explorer to cross the entire expanse
of the Antarctic continent via the
South Pole. In early 1915, endurance
became imprisoned in the pack ice,
whose frozen grip slowly crushed her
and led to her sinking ten months
later. Shackleton's crew had been
forced to abandon ship and face the
full brutality of the Antarctic
environment, setting up camp on the
floating ice where they lived for a
number of months.

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In April 1916, the team set off in
three small boats, eventually
reaching Elephant Island. Shackleton
decided he needed to find help and
leaving the bulk of his crew behind
took five crew members and set off in
a small boat. The six men spent 16
days crossing 13 hundred kilometres
of ocean, to reach an island called
South Georgia, where they then
trekked across it to a whaling
station. The endurance crewman who
had remained behind were subsequently
rescued in August of 1916.

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Due to Shackleton's brave actions
under extreme conditions, not a
single member of the expedition died.
Shackleton published his account of
the Endurance expedition in his book
South, which was published in 1919.
His exploration and wanderlust still
not fully satiated, Shackleton set
out on his fourth expedition a two
years later in 1921, with the aim of
circumnavigating the Antarctic
continent. However, on the 5th of
January in 1922 Shackleton died of a
heart attack off South Georgia and
following the wishes of his wife, he
was buried on the island.

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Shackleton story was a bit of a
tragic one, where away from his
expeditions he lived a relatively
restless and unfulfilled life. In his
pursuit of rapid pathways to wealth
and security, he launched numerous
unsuccessful business ventures and
ultimately died in significant debt.
Despite being lauded by the press
upon his death, Shackleton and his
feats were largely forgotten, while
the heroic reputation of his rival
Scott lived on. Later in the nineteen
hundreds, Shackleton would be
rediscovered by the public and
rapidly became a role model for
leadership due to his performance
under such extreme circumstances,
where against the odds he managed to
keep his team intact and return them
all home alive.