South

'We longed keenly for the day when we could begin this march, the last great adventure in this history of South Polar exploration . . . '

As war clouds darkened over Europe in 1914, a party led by veteran explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to make the first crossing of the entire Antarctic continent via the Pole. But their initial optimism was short-lived as ice floes closed around their ship, Endurance, gradually crushing her to death and marooning twenty-eight men on the polar ice.

Alone in the world's most unforgiving environment, Shackleton and his team began a brutal quest for survival. As the story of their journey across treacherous seas and a wilderness of glaciers and snow fields unfolds, the scale of their courage and heroism becomes movingly clear.

'One of the most harrowing survival stories of all time.'
- Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm

Introduction by FERGUS FLEMING
Photographs by FRANK HURLEY

About The Author

Sir Ernest Shackleton is regarded as perhaps the greatest of all Antarctic explorers. Born in 1874 in County Kildare, he was apprenticed in the Merchant Navy and became a junior officer under Scott during the 1901-04 expedition to the South Pole. In 1907 he led his own expedition on the whaler Nimrod, coming within ninety-seven miles of the South Pole, the feat for which he was knighted. The events of that expedition are chronicled in his first book The Heart of the Antarctic.

His heroic reputation was made during the ill-fated Endurance expedition, during which he lead his men to safety after being marooned for two years on the polar ice. South is his recounting of this expedition. He died in 1922 during his fourth Antarctic expedition and was buried in the whaler's cemetery on South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic.