Tackling the Final Frontier

...When the Norwegian Roald Amundsen accomplished in 1911 what the English explorers had failed to do, Shackleton, undaunted (and quietly relieved that the conqueror of the Pole had not been Scott), settled on a new obj ective to assure him his place in history...

...Only 97 frustrating miles short of the Pole, their supplies stretched dangerously thin, they too had to concede defeat...

...It was, said one of those left behind, "the forlornest forlorn hope conceivable," yet after 17 grueling days on the high seas, brilliant navigation and steely determination brought them to their destination . This astounding adventure was to be Shackleton's last assault on the Antarctic...

...The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, dismissed the idea as a "sterilequest," but on August 1,1914, as Germany was declaring war on France, and Britain was preparing for the inevitable, Shackleton sailed off on the ship Endurance for his third Antarctic expedition...

...Little more than a week later, he and five other men embarked on a 700-mile trip to South Georgia, where they knew there was a whaling station...

...Ernest Shackleton's story is a paradigm of sorts, an account of the outer limits of human endurance that will linger in the memory as a touchstone of physical courage...

...For the next nine months she drifted slowly north, until October 27, when the movement of the ice crushed her and the men were forced to establish camp directly on the floe...

...and nothing has so reinforced the notion of a "spaceship Earth" as the revelation that Venus, our nearest neighbor, once thought to offer the greatest possibility of extraterrestrial life, is in reality a brutally uninhabitable environment that makes the Antarctic look like a health spa...

...With that experience behind him, Shackleton was ready to tackle the Pole on his own once he raised the necessary funds...

...Scott, who was no better in such matters, can be held responsible for these failings, but for the deficiencies of the second journey there is no one to blame except Shackleton...

...Because of an abnormally cold southern spring that year, pack ice was seen farther north than usual, and on January 19,1915, the Endurance was frozen in, 60 miles from shore...

...Additional incentive, if he needed any, came from the rivalry that had developed between himself and Scott...

...That year Carsten Borchgrevink, a Norwegian adventurer, had become the first man to winter there, initiating the race for the Pole...

...We only know that something irrevocable has occurred...

...The heavens are not a frontier...

...On the first expedition with Scott, Shackleton did not know ho w to ski...

...The photographs of faraway moons and planets are forbidding, one might say inhuman...

...Huntford, whose previous book Scott and Amundsen was turned into the PBS Masterpiece Theater series "The Last Place on Earth," has at best an ambivalent view of his subject...

...In 1908, he was back on the ice, reaching Furthest South in 29 days, a month less than it had taken Scott...

...Although they failed by over 400 miles to reach their goal, and nearly died of scurvy and starvation on the return to home base—with Shackleton coming particularly close to losing his life—they still managed to best Borchgrevink's record for Furthest South by more than 200 miles...

...They are a void, with no end to them...

...At the same time, page after page of the book is filled with descriptions of utter incompetence, heedless derring-do, and melodramatic posturing...

...Even the space program, the endeavor trying most strenuously to uphold the heroic romanticism of the Shackleton era, merely manages to undermine its own rhetoric of new frontiers...

...It is agood thing that he was extraordinarily brave, because he was forever putting himself and others into situations that required every ounce of his courage...

...He chose men idiosyncratically, seeking qualities like "optimism" and "idealism," apparently placing no valueon knowledge or experience...

...He wildly overestimated the amount of ground he could cover each day, and therefore failed to bring adequate supplies...

...The Shackletons, Amundsens and Scotts led the conquest of the last frontier, and left the globe a smaller place...

...He gives Shackleton full credit for bravery and an ability to bring out the finest in men under stress...

...British pilots were refused parachutes during the War because life-saving equipment was considered "unmanly...

...HUNTFORD, who has a penchant for generalizing about national character, believes that career was merely one gavotte in Britain's decadent Totentanz...

...On April 9,1916, with the ice melting under their feet, they took to three lifeboats, arriving after a hazardous seven-day journey at Elephant Island, an inhospitable piece of rock that was last publicly visited in 1830...

...Shackleton remained resolute...

...The race to be first was, said Shackleton, "a stupendous sporting event...

...For the first time in over a year they had solid land under their feet, but with no hope of rescue...

...He never got there...

...scarecrow figures stumbling through the snow...

...Shackleton had penetrated 360 miles deeper into the Antarctic than any other human being and he returned to England a national hero, proof in those anxious years before World War I of the supremacy of the "British race...

...He planned a 1,500-mile journey, much of it through unknown terrain, beginning at the shore of the treacherous, largely uncharted Weddell Sea...

...Surely, however, no sporting event has so altered our fundamental psychology...

...His third trip to the Antarctic is especially awe-inspiring: For 15 months he and his 27 men were adrift on an ice floe, living on a diet of seal and penguin, surviving a polar winter...

...Yet in so doing he also reminds us that the polar explorers came at the conclusion of a great and important tradition, now completely gone, to achieve the dominion over the earth which the Bible says is mankind's God-given heritage...

...Though his preparations for the third voyage were better, he continued to take unnecessary risks: He neglected to hire a trained dog driver and he refused to read what little literature there was on the regions he planned to traverse because, in his eyes, such precautions meant succumbing to "pessimism.' A kind of intrepid madness pervades Shackleton's entire career...

...For the first time in human history, man now comprehends the entire earth, and it beckons not with its challenges but with its fragility, no longer requiring discovery but preservation...

...It is impossible to ignore the connection between the end of the 500-year-old Age of Exploration and the beginnings of an Age of Environmentalism...

...Still uncomfortable with dogs, he opted to rely on ponies for the 1,500-mile trip...

...After camping along the continent's rim through the winter of 1902, Scott, Shackleton and a third man, Edward Wilson, set off on foot on November 2, in the middle of the southern spring, to cover the 1,500 miles to the Pole and back...

...Huntford is right to point out Shackleton's foolhardiness...

...Jaun-tiness was all even when death was the likely result...

...One irresistibly recalls Edgar's lines in King Lear: "the worst is not, so long as we can say 'This is the worst.'" Born in 1874 the son of a struggling physician, the energetic and ambitious Shackleton, eager for glory, volunteered in 1900 to join Robert Scott's expedition to Antarctica...

...We do not yet fully understand all of the ramifications of this momentous change, how it is affecting our basic ideas about life, death, existence, destiny...

...Woefully unprepared and foolishly improvident, they trekked across the ice for two months before being forced to turn around...

...The answer is Yes...

...He faced ever more seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and yet succeeded in saving everyone in his party...

...He would be the first man to cross the entire continent...

...In Edwardian England, gesture was preferred to truth, theater to reality...

...The miscalculation, besides endangering himself and his men, probably cost him the Pole...

...The Englishmen reveled in their amateurism, their suffering...

...Scott's and Shack-leton's recklessness is contrasted throughout with the cautious professionalism and technical proficiency of the Norwegians...

...If not the South Pole, he at least gained a knighthood...

...Why, after all, did they strive for the Pole...

...Writers & Writing TACKLING THE FINAL FRONTIER BY BARRY GEWEN The immediate question raised by Roland Huntford's Shackleton (Atheneum, 774 pp., $29.95) is whether anyone should spend the time to read a biography the length of a Russian novel about a turn-of-the-century Anglo-Irish polar explorer whom few Americans have ever heard of...

...The four men resembled grotesque caricatures by some mad engraver: hollow-eyed, faces burned, blistered and deformed by sunburn and frostbite...

...Somehow locating one of the few gaps through the 3,000-mile-long Transantarctic Mountain Range, he and his three companions persevered despite winds of 100 miles an hour and body temperatures four degrees below normal...

...then Shackleton took an open lifeboat through hurricane conditions across hundreds of miles of "the stormiest seas on earth...

...neither could he handle dogs or pitch a tent or load sledges properly...

...Not for science or knowledge, and not for imperial conquest—it would be many years before wealth could be extracted from the ice —but simply for glory...

...The 730-mile journey back was the most arduous yet...

...He was buried, appropriately, on the island of South Georgia...

...If the polar explorers appear a little ridiculous today, in large part it is because the 20th century has directed us to different tasks...

...Shackleton was rightfully proud of the fact that no one ever died under his command...

...If a reader learns nothing else from this volume, he will come away understanding why dogs are wonderful animals to have along when one is visiting the South Pole...

...In 1922, on his way to attempt a circumnavigation of the continent, his heart gave out, overstrained, the examining doctor said, by the ferocious demands he had made upon his body...