The Big White - Terra Incognita - page 9

a close little more than two decades later, on 5 January 1922, when Sir Ernest Shackleton clutched
his heart and died in the cramped cabin of his last ship, Quest , off the lonely island of South Geor-
gia.
Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen and Douglas Mawson: the Big Four.
These were the heroes of a generation of children who pored over images of bergs towering above
wooden ships and men and dogs straining in front of sledges. Queen Victoria had only been dead
six months when Discovery steamed away from the Isle of Wight, and the twentieth century hadn't
yet gathered momentum; when it did, it would steamroller these and many other dreams.
Scott, as English as overcooked cabbage, led two expeditions, setting out first in 1901 in the
specially commissioned Discovery and ten years later in the spartan converted whaler Terra Nova .
During the second expedition he reached the South Pole a month after Amundsen. When he saw
the Norwegian flag flapping in the distance Scott wrote in his journal, 'The worst has happened.'
Two men died during the march home, and Scott and his two remaining companions perished in
their tent, holed up in a blizzard eleven miles from a supply depot.
Shackleton was an Anglo-Irishman, and he first went south aboard Discovery , under Scott's
command. On that expedition he sledged to the 81st parallel with Scott, but was eventually inval-
ided home with scurvy. In 1907 Shackleton set out aboard Nimrod as leader, at last, of his own
expedition, and on that journey he got to within 97 nautical miles of the Pole. It was, at the time,
the furthest south ever reached. In 1914 he went again, leading an ambitious expedition in which
two ships, the Endurance and the Aurora , deposited parties of men on opposite sides of the con-
tinent. The plan was that one party, led by Shackleton, was to sledge across Antarctica while the
other laid depots on the opposite side. It didn't work out like that. Endurance was crushed by pack
ice in the Weddell Sea and Shackleton was obliged to embark on an epic struggle to save himself
and his men. It was an exceptionally difficult ice year, and on the other side the Ross Sea party
also got into severe difficulties. After the First World War, Shackleton left Britain again, this time
aboard Quest , with the aim of mapping an unknown sector of Antarctic coastline. On the journey
out, he died.
Together with Ibsen and Grieg, Roald Amundsen brought his young country out of the shadowy
realm of northern mists. He had extensive experience in the north, made the first transit in one ves-
sel of the Northwest Passage, and travelled with Fridtjof Nansen, the greatest polar explorer of all.
Amundsen was planning to reach the North Pole, but when he heard that Frederick Cook claimed
to have got there, he decided to go south, and set out in 1910 aboard Fram - though he didn't tell
the crew or the rest of the world his true destination until he reached Madeira, off the north African
coast. Until then, only his brother knew. Amundsen and four companions reached ninety degrees
south on 14 December 1911 and raised a Norwegian flag on the brick-hard ice at the South Pole.
Mawson was a scientist. A British-born Australian, he first went south with Shackleton, aboard
Nimrod . Mawson was one of three men to reach the South Magnetic Pole, the south pole of the
earth's magnetic field (as opposed to the geographic South Pole, which is the southern point of
the earth's rotation). In 1911 he led the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, also aboard Aurora ,
and made a legendary one-man journey by walking hundreds of miles back to base after his two
companions had died, one of them disappearing down a crevasse with almost all the food and the