“However, the depictions he produced are probably among the most iconic in the history of photography.” Looming out of the ice, its masts and rigging glowing against the black Antarctic night, the images also provide the RGS exhibition with its most dramatic highlights. But when they went off he was temporarily blinded by the light and stumbled into the ice. “These flares were sequenced to go off at exactly the same moment that Hurley pressed his camera shutter. “It was pitch dark and Hurley was allowed to set up flares around the ship,” said Alasdair MacLeod, curator of the RGS exhibition. At the same time, Hurley set about taking some of the most dramatic photographs in the history of 20th-century polar exploration, including stunning backlit images of the imprisoned, ice-covered Endurance. Shackleton set up a camp on the ice and for months he and his men waited in the hope that it might melt and eventually free the Endurance. Photograph: © Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) The Endurance stuck in the pack ice during the polar night. (Shackleton offered to turn back to help Britain’s war effort but was allowed to proceed.)īy January 1915, the ship had reached the Weddell Sea where some of the worst pack ice ever recorded began to slow down the Endurance until, on the 19th, she could go no further. Endurance set off, in August 1914, from West India Docks in London, just as war was declared with Germany. His confidence was misplaced as events transpired although his argument prevailed. Shackleton replied that “death is a very little thing and knowledge very great … and really Regents Street holds more dangers than the 5 million square miles that constitute the Antarctic continent”. “Enough money has been spent on this sterile quest,” he told Shackleton, in an exchange highlighted in the RGS exhibition. He would lead an expedition that would traverse the entire continent, a proposal that was derided by Winston Churchill, then first lord of the Admiralty. Not to be outdone, Shackleton devised an even more ambitious reason for returning to Antarctica. Photograph: Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge/Getty Images Officers and crew pose under the bow of the Endurance at Weddell Sea base. The second was directed by Scott – whose party perished as they tried to get back to base camp. The first party to arrive was led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Two years later, two expeditions reached the south pole. As the RGS exhibition notes, Shackleton’s decision was courageous. His men just made it but would certainly have perished had they ploughed on to reach the pole that had been only a short distance away. “It is neck or nothing with us now … Our food lies ahead and death stalks us from behind,” Shackleton wrote in his diary. 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. Ernest Shackleton during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-17.
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