Ernest Shackleton - Quick facts

 

 

He was an Anglo-Irish explorer who was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

His first experience of the polar regions was as third officer on Captain Scott’s Discovery Expedition, 1901–04, from which he was sent home early on health grounds.

Up to the age of 10, he grew up in Kilkea, Ireland, thirty miles from Dublin.

Shackleton was knighted by King Edward VII.

In 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton set sail for the Antarctic aboard the ship Endurance, trying to be the first to cross Antarctica from one side to the other.

Endurance departed London the same day Germany declared war on Russia—August 1, 1914.

With the ship anchored at Plymouth, England, Shackleton offered the services of his ship and crew for the war effort, but Winston Churchill, then Secretary of the Admiralty, sent back a one-word telegram: "Proceed."

Endurance became beset in pack ice on January 18, 1915. It was a grip from which she would never gain release.

On November 15, almost a year after they had left South Georgia, Shackleton and his crew watched the ice-crumpled Endurance sink beneath the frozen sea.

Despite losing their ship in one of the most remote parts of the world, Shackleton got all 28 men safely back to England.

Shackleton launched a new expedition in 1921 aboard the ship Quest.

The Quest arrived at South Georgia on January 4, 1922. Late that night, in the wee hours of January 5, Shackleton suddenly had a massive heart attack and died. He was 47 years old.