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Ernest Shackleton's Great Adventure

by Margaret Etherton

When Ernest Shackleton was a boy living in England, he dreamt of sailing the seven seas on one of the big ships in the port of Liverpool. He never imagined that he would become a great adventurer and that one of his journeys would make him a hero. He was only 16 when he set out on his first voyage on a rigger that endured a blizzard for nearly two months as it sailed around Cape Horn. Ernest loved it. He decided then to be an explorer of the great Antarctic South.

At the age of 24, Ernest was a ship's captain. By the time he was 40, he planned an adventure--- to lead an expedition to walk across the Antarctic continent from one side to the other. He advertised for men brave enough for the trip and 5,000 applied. He chose the best sailors and scientists to study the animals, the weather, and the glaciers in the sub-freezing landscape.

In 1914, Ernest set out with 56 men in his tiny ship the Endurance. She had coal-driven engines, massive square-rigged sails on three tall masts and, to plough through the ice, a hull at the bow over three feet thick.

That summer, the Endurance encountered more ice than expected. The ship became trapped in the Weddell Sea, part of the Southern Ocean. Ernest's real adventure had begun. The crew abandoned ship and lived on the ice floe in shanties. They were still far from land when the packed ice started to crack and their precious ship groaned as if it was being tortured. Finally, the Endurance was crushed into splinters and sank.

Ernest and his crew desperately needed to be rescued! But this was a time before communication satellites, before mobile phones. On the other side of the world in England, people thought that they must be dead!

Ernest decided to sail in lifeboats to Elephant Island, an ice-covered, mountainous island off the coast of Antarctica. First, they had to carry everything across the melting ice in freezing conditions. Amazingly they made it, but they were still not saved. The nearest civilization was a whaling station 1300 km (800 miles) away on South Georgia Island!

Leaving most of the men behind, he set out in a tiny boat just over 7 meters long (23 feet). Three men sailed above while three tried to sleep below. Every few minutes, water swamped the deck. Ice collected on the boat as the sea-spray froze and weighed the boat down, ready to sink her. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were the same---a pan of hot "hoosh" made from Bovril (a salty beef extract), two biscuits, and some lumps of sugar.

Braving a hurricane, the men reached South Georgia Island in 19 exhausting days; but, they landed on the wrong side of the island. Ernest's adventure was not over. He took two of his men and walked over an impossibly icy landscape of crevasses, slopes, and barren rocks to the other side. They arrived in tattered clothes with long beards and matted hair, as if they hadn't washed in a year (which they hadn't!).

Shackleton desperately wanted to save his men, so he made three attempts to sail to their island. Only on the third attempt did he find his crew safe and alive. They had lived on nothing but seal, penguin, and shellfish, with seal liver as a treat!

Ernest Shackleton was a hero. He saved the lives of his men by rowing hundreds of miles, surviving a hurricane, and walking non-stop across a windswept island to get help. He had not crossed Antarctica, but he had had a great adventure!

Bibliography

Shackleton, Ernest. South: A Memoir of the Endurance Voyage. New York: Carroll and Graff Publishers, 1998.

Lansing, Alfred. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. New York: Carroll and Graff Publishers, 1999.

Photos reprinted courtesy of the National Library of Australia.
Photo 1:  http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an23998560-v.
Photo 2: http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an23478554-v.

Margaret Etherton is a teacher, tutor and writer. She has taught a range of subjects, such as reading, writing, mathematics and computers to people of all ages - from small kids to seniors. Her publishing credits include over twenty fiction and non-fiction articles for Australian School Magazines. Many of her stories have been created about animals from an interesting viewpoint or with a twist in the telling. Margaret lives close to the beach in Sydney with her husband, her four children and her cat, Mushka.


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