Book review: Ernest Shackleton's rich life explored in new biography
Ernest Shackleton made three expeditions to the Antipodean world that will forever mark him as one of the great frontiersmen. Picture: PA
THE era of polar exploration which enthralled the world’s imagination in the several decades before and after the turn of the 19th century threw up some extraordinary characters. There was the famous Scott of the Antarctic, who fired the passion of nations; the Norwegian Roald Amundsen who, in the face of fierce competition, became the first man to conquer the South Pole.
Similarly in the Arctic others had set pulses racing: Nansen, the Norwegian who had skied across Greenland; the unfortunate John Franklin who died trying to forge the northwest passage in the 1840s. The German Wilhelm Filchner attempted a trans-continental crossing of the Antarctic. Other minor players attested to the grip on the imagination that these ice explorers held. However, as thrilling as it was at the time, it was a fad, and fads pass.
