When Sir Ernest Shackleton set off for Antarctica on his ship Endurance, he made sure he had plenty of reading material. But details of precisely what books he took have remained hidden in this photograph – until now.
(By Paul Kerley, BBC News Magazine) The image from the ill-fated South Pole expedition – taken in early March 1915 by Australian photographer Frank Hurley – has been digitised by the Royal Geographical Society in London.
It is now known that the explorer carried with him dictionaries, encyclopedias and books chronicling other dangerous polar expeditions.
He took established works by Dostoyevsky and Shelley – but also, explains Alasdair MacLeod from the RGS, “newly published fiction by popular authors of the time”.
“The cabin wall on the left also shows a framed print of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’, which Shackleton carried with him on to the ice floe when the ship sank.”
In January 1915, Endurance and her 28-man crew became trapped in ice in the Weddell Sea. Shackleton and his men would remain there for 10 months – until the ship sank and they moved on to the ice. In April 1916, in three small boats taken off Endurance, the crew left the ice and began an arduous voyage to uninhabited Elephant Island. From there, Shackleton took a small group with him to South Georgia – 750 miles away – where they finally got help.
All members of Endurance’s crew survived.
Scroll down to see the full list of books identified by experts at the RGS – and see more stark images of Shackleton’s struggle for survival.
Books on Shackleton’s bookshelf:
Encyclopedia Britannica
Seven short plays by Lady Gregory
Perch of the devil by Getrude Atherton
Pip by Ian Hey
Plays: pleasant and unpleasant, Vol 2 Pleasant by G B Shaw
Almayer’s folly by Joseph Conrad
Dr Brewer’s readers handbook
The Brassbounder by David Bone
The case of Miss Elliott by Emmuska Orczy
Raffles by EW Hornung
The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett
Pros and cons: a newspaper reader’s and debater’s guide to the leading controversies of the day by JB Askew
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Woman’s view by Herbert Flowerdew
Thou Fool by JJ Bell
The Message of Fate by Louis Tracy
The Barrier by Rex Beach
Manual of English Grammar and Composition by Nesfield
A book of light verse
Oddsfish by Robert Hugh Benson
Poetical works of Shelley
Monsieur de Rochefort by H De Vere Stacpoole
Voyage of the Vega by Nordenskjold
The threshold of the unknown region by Clements Markham
Cassell’s book of quotations by W Gurney Benham
The concise Oxford dictionary
Chambers biographical dictionary
Cassell’s new German-English English-German dictionary
Chambers 20th Century dictionary
The northwest passage by Roald Amundsen
The voyage of the Fox in Arctic seas by McClintock
Whitaker’s almanac
World’s end by Amelie Rives
Potash and perlmutter by Montague Glass
Round the horn before the mast by A Basil Lubbock
The witness for the defence by AEW Mason
Five years of my life by Alfred Dreyfuss
The morals of Marcus Ordeyne by William J Locke
The rescue of Greely by Commander Winfield Scott Schley
United States Grinnell Expedition by Dr Kane
Three years of Arctic service by Greely
Voyage to the Polar Sea by Nares
Journal of HMS Enterprise by Collinson
Photo digitisation process completed with help from Picturae.
Enduring Eye: The Antarctic Legacy of Sir Ernest Shackleton and Frank Hurley
