After the Americans had claimed the North Pole in 1909 and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had pipped Britain's Sir Robert Falcon Scott in the race to the South Pole in 1911, Shackleton, already knighted for his unsuccessful attempt on the latter in 1907-09, felt impelled to match them with a venture many thought reckless.
In the end, the officially titled Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition did, indeed, finish in failure. Yet, with not a single life lost in the 28-man party, it became an epic story of the icefields, given new resonance by the evocative discovery last week of the sunken Endurance in the Weddell Sea after a painstaking search (Another country, March 2).
Among the crew was the brave and resourceful Australian photographer and filmmaker Frank Hurley. The short-funded Shackleton knew that selling picture rights would be a key income source and Hurley had already impressed with the images he'd taken on Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic expedition of 1911. Hurley's film of Shackleton's expedition, South, sponsored by the Daily Chronicle and first shown in London in 1919, is now considered the world's first documentary feature film, according to the British Film Institute (BFI).
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