Questions to ask Ernest Shackleton

Shackleton before the Endurance

Ernest Henry Shackleton was born on 15 February 1874 at Kilkea, County Kildare, in Ireland, one of ten children. The family moved to London in 1884, where his father worked as a doctor, and he went to Dulwich College. At 16 he went to sea in the merchant navy and qualified as a master mariner in 1898.

In 1901 to 1903 he sailed south on Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery expedition and, with Scott and Edward Wilson, reached a record 82°17′ south before scurvy forced him home. On his own Nimrod expedition he and three companions reached 88°23′ south on 9 January 1909, 97 nautical miles from the South Pole, then turned back because the food would not last the return. He was knighted that year. Roald Amundsen reached the Pole in December 1911 and Scott a month later; Scott's party died on the way back.

The Endurance expedition, month by month

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition planned to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, while a second party, the Ross Sea party, laid food depots from the other side.

For a wax museum, the moment to choose is 20 May 1916 at Stromness: he has just walked out of the mountains, filthy and bearded, and does not yet know whether the men on Elephant Island are alive.

Questions about the 1909 decision

What the record says: The Heart of the Antarctic (1909), his account of the Nimrod expedition, describes the party's hunger as they pushed south. Biographers quote a remark to his wife Emily on his return, that he thought she would rather have a live donkey than a dead lion. The same expedition made the first ascent of Mount Erebus, and another party reached the region of the South Magnetic Pole.

1. How did it feel to turn back 97 miles from the Pole?
2. How did you decide that the food would not last?
3. What did you learn on Scott's Discovery expedition, and why did the two of you fall out?
4. When Amundsen reached the Pole in 1911, what did you think?

Questions about the ship and the ice

What the record says: South describes months of drifting with the pack, the slow crushing of the ship, and life at Ocean Camp and Patience Camp on the floe. Food ran short; the sledge dogs and the carpenter's cat, Mrs Chippy, had to be killed. In December 1915 the carpenter, Harry McNish, refused orders during a hard march, the closest thing to a mutiny on the expedition; Shackleton later left him off the list for the Polar Medal.

1. What did you tell the men on the day you abandoned the ship?
2. Why did you order everyone to leave all but two pounds of personal belongings on the ice?
3. How did you keep 27 men from losing hope through a polar winter on the ice?
4. What did you eat, and what did you miss most?
5. How did you deal with McNish, and was it fair to deny him the Polar Medal?

Questions about the James Caird and South Georgia

What the record says: Elephant Island lay far from any shipping route, so rescue had to be fetched. Shackleton chose the strongest of the three boats, the 22-foot James Caird, strengthened by McNish, and took Worsley as navigator, with Crean, McNish, John Vincent and Timothy McCarthy. Worsley fixed their position with a sextant on only a handful of sights in the whole voyage. After landing, they crossed the unmapped mountains of South Georgia with screws through their boot soles for grip.

1. Why choose to sail some 800 miles across the Southern Ocean in winter instead of waiting?
2. How did you pick the five men who went with you?
3. How did Frank Worsley find a small island with so few sights of the sun?
4. What happened during the crossing of South Georgia, when you had no map?
5. What did the whalers at Stromness say when they saw you?

Questions about rescue, loss and leadership

What the record says: the men on Elephant Island, under Frank Wild, lived for four and a half months under two upturned boats. Three rescue attempts failed in the ice before the Yelcho, commanded by Luis Pardo, reached them on 30 August 1916. On the other side of the continent, the Ross Sea party laid its depots for a crossing that never came, and three of its men died: Aeneas Mackintosh, Victor Hayward and the Reverend Arnold Spencer-Smith.

1. What did you see when the Yelcho came round the point at Elephant Island?
2. Do you feel responsible for the three men of the Ross Sea party who died?
3. What makes a good leader in a disaster?
4. Why did you go south again in 1921 on the Quest?

Ask the Ross Sea question with care. Their story is told in South too, and it is the expedition's real loss.

Sample answers from South and his letters

Question: What was it like drifting on the ice, waiting for it to open?

Question: What did you think about as you came down into Stromness?

Question: Why did you turn back in 1909? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: he told Emily he thought she would rather have a live donkey than a dead lion (from his letters, as quoted by his biographers).

Question: How do you face setbacks? Roland Huntford's biography quotes him saying that difficulties are just things to overcome, after all. Use it with that attribution.

Questions he could not answer, and one famous fake

• How he died: of a heart attack aboard the Quest at Grytviken, South Georgia, on 5 January 1922, aged 47. He is buried there.
• The discovery of the Endurance wreck in March 2022, about 3,000 metres down in the Weddell Sea, remarkably well preserved.
• Aircraft, research stations or the Antarctic Treaty of 1959.
• If the interview is set in May 1916: whether the men on Elephant Island will survive.

Be careful with the famous newspaper advertisement beginning “Men wanted for hazardous journey”. No copy has ever been found in any newspaper of the time, and researchers think it was invented later. Our guide on how to check if a quote is real explains how stories like this spread.

Where to find his own words and the photographs

Project Gutenberg has South, his account of the Endurance expedition, published in 1919, and Wikisource has his writings too. The Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge holds expedition diaries, letters and the Polar Museum. Frank Hurley's photographs and film of the Endurance in the ice are the best visual sources; Alfred Lansing's Endurance (1959), built on interviews with survivors, is the classic narrative.

If you want to try your questions aloud first, Yuga's Ernest Shackleton is an AI recreation drawn from South and the historical record. It is not Shackleton and can make mistakes, so cite South and the diaries in your project. For his great rival in the race for the Pole, try Roald Amundsen, and see the greatest explorers in history.