As they staggered back towards their base camp, over the Beardmore glacier, they began to suffer from bitter cold, endured near starvation and were left with their clothes in tatters. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty ImagesĪnd here, poised on the threshold of greatness, Shackleton turned back his party as his calculations suggested his men had insufficient rations to ensure a safe return. Left to right: Joe Irving, Oswald Barr, Tim McCarthy and Wal How. Shackleton later returned with his own expedition, on the Nimrod, and led a four-man party that got within 100 miles of the pole in January 1909.Ĭrewmen of the Endurance during preparations for Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition in London. Both film and exhibition feature striking camera work and provide vivid accounts of the privations that Shackleton and his men endured as they headed off to explore Antarctica.īorn in Ireland and raised in south London, Shackleton first visited the south pole when he served on the 1901-03 Discovery expedition led by Robert Scott.
The film and most of the exhibition’s finest images are the handiwork of Frank Hurley, who sailed with Shackleton and who was one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers and film-makers. In addition, a digitally remastered version of South, a documentary film – one of the first ever made – of Shackleton’s 1914-16 Endurance expedition is being screened at the British Film Institute in London.
Now the centenary of his death is being marked with a lavishly illustrated exhibition – Shackleton’s legacy and the power of early Antarctic photography – which opens at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), in London on Monday and which includes a range of images and artefacts from his expeditions. Photograph: Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge/Getty Images Ernest Shackleton during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-17.
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