South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition, 1914-1917

About this book

In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to cross the whole Antarctic continent on foot. His ship, the Endurance, was trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea before reaching land, drifted for months and was finally crushed and sank. Shackleton tells how his twenty-eight men camped on the drifting ice, escaped in three small boats to the bleak rock of Elephant Island, and how he and five companions then sailed eight hundred miles in an open boat across the stormiest ocean in the world to South Georgia, crossed its unmapped mountains and came back to rescue every one of his men.

Context and significance

Shackleton (1874–1922) published the book in 1919; it also tells the hard story of the expedition's other party on the Ross Sea side. It is one of the greatest true stories of survival and leadership, and Frank Hurley's photographs from the voyage are famous. The race to the Pole a few years earlier is told by Roald Amundsen in The South Pole.

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