SHACKLETON AT THE SOUTH POLE SHACKLETON (Sir Ernest Henry, 1874-1922, British Antarctic Explorer)

Superb Postcard photograph signed, with the printed caption "Lieutenant Shackleton, Arctic Explorer 1908 nearest the South Pole", showing him in his arctic uniform with fun gloves, standing in the snow with another of the team struggling with a sledge behind him, 5½" x 3½", no place, no date, but South Pole, slightly worn

After being invalided home in the relief ship Morning in 1903, Shackleton left the sea as a profession and took up various engagements, each of which he soon abandoned. From 1904 to 1905 he was secretary of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. He stood unsuccessfully for parliament as liberal-unionist candidate at Dundee in January 1906 and entered Messrs. W. Beardmore's engineering works in Glasgow, but was already busy planning to return to the Antarctic. One of his main objects was to reach the South Pole, but he also wanted to explore the Barrier.
Shackleton sailed in the small whaler Nimrod in August 1907, and reached the Ross barrier in the following January. Forced by pack ice to abandon his intention to land on King Edward Land, he made his base in McMurdo Sound, and accompanied by Dr. Eric Marshall, Lieutenant Jameson Boyd Adams, R.N.R., and Frank Wild, R.N., by way of the Barrier and the Beardmore glacier, which he discovered, succeeded in reaching lat. 88° 23¢ S. on the Antarctic plateau (9 January 1909). The expedition also sent a party under Professor (Sir) T. W. Edgeworth David to the South Magnetic Pole, which was reached 16 January 1909, and another to the summit of Mount Erebus (13,200 ft.), which was gained 10 March 1908. On his return in March 1909 Shackleton was the hero of the hour and enjoyed to the full his well-merited popularity. He received the C.V.O. and a knighthood, was elected a younger brother of Trinity House. Parliament voted £20,000 to defray the liabilities of the expedition, and Shackleton paid other costs by a prolonged lecturing tour in Europe and America. The expedition is described in his The Heart of the Antarctic (1909).
The "Great Southern Journey", as Frank Wild called it, began on 29th October 1908. On 9th January 1909, Shackleton and three companions (Wild, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams) reached a new Farthest South latitude of 88° 23' S, a point only 112 miles (180 km) from the Pole.

Item Date:  1908

Stock No:  38120