Some of history’s greatest adventurers and heroic figures made their reputations by traveling to the true ends of the Earth, the frozen desolation of the North and South Poles.
Ernest Shackleton tried at least four times to reach the South Pole and never succeeded, yet among present-day polar explorers and scientists who still risk their lives in those frigid far reaches, he may well be the greatest name in polar exploration.
Now the man who first reached Antarctica nearly a century ago is becoming known even among people whose sense of arctic adventure extends no farther than running a snow blower down the driveway.
A recent spate of books on Shackleton has set off a race in Hollywood to produce the first film about his exploits, and exhibits on polar exploration that open Saturday in the Field Museum and the Newberry Library are likely to raise his profile higher yet.
The British explorer is admired today not for what he discovered, for he discovered nothing. He is admired, instead, for his courage, leadership and devotion to the safety of his men in the face of seemingly certain death.
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Like the aborted Apollo 13 mission to the moon, Shackleton’s 1914 expedition in which he planned to cross Antarctica on foot was a journey that became more dramatic and memorable when it went badly wrong.
In some ways, his failure is more stirring than Norwegian Roald Amundsen’s success in reaching the South Pole for the first time three years earlier.
The exhibit at the Field Museum is called “The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition” and unfolds through startlingly beautiful photographs and movies from crewman Frank Hurley of Australia.
As with Apollo 13, the Endurance was a vessel that never reached its destination. Trapped in ice still a day’s sail from the Antarctic coast on Jan. 19, 1915, Shackleton and his band of scientists, explorers and sled dogs sat helplessly for months on the 144-foot wooden ship.
On Oct. 27, true disaster struck. The ship’s hull failed and shattered, sinking to the bottom. For the next five months, the 28 men, already presumed dead, camped on vast ice floes, eating seals and penguins.
Having salvaged three small lifeboats, they eventually reached a small, frozen speck of uninhabited rock called Elephant Island.
Leaving 22 men behind, Shackleton and five others set sail in a lifeboat for the only inhabited outpost for thousands of miles around, a Norwegian whaling station on South Georgia Island 800 miles away.
That open-sea voyage, one of the most famous in maritime annals because of the difficulty of finding a small island in a makeshift boat in the world’s most treacherous seas, took 22 days.
Once they reached the island, Shackleton and his men had to climb glaciers and mountains to reach the whaling station, then organize four attempts to rescue the other men before finally succeeding on Aug. 30, 1916.
“Not a life lost,” Shackleton proudly wrote afterward, “and we have been through Hell.”
The exhibit was organized by and first shown at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Now traveling around the country, it will remain at the Field through Jan. 14.
“The story of the Endurance is one of the greatest tales in expedition history,” said Field president John McCarter. “It is a testament to the strength of the human spirit.”
Beginning Saturday, Shackleton will be a considerable presence at the Newberry Library as well. Working in conjunction with the Field, the library has put together an exhibit on 500 years of British and American efforts to explore the far northern and southern hemispheres.
“To the Ends of the Earth” features 125 artifacts from the library’s collections, including original accounts written in the 1500s of attempts to find a direct route through the North Pole from Europe to Asia.
A major portion of the Newberry’s holdings dealing with polar exploration comes from the Gerald F. Fitzgerald Collection of more than 750 books, 300 maps and artifacts. Fitzgerald, a retired banker and father of U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.), donated his collection to the library.
The exploits of many famous explorers are represented through accounts and artifacts: American Robert E. Peary, the first person to reach the North Pole; the failed and fatal attempt by Englishman Robert F. Scott to reach the South Pole; and the first airplane flight over the South Pole by American Richard E. Byrd.
Running through Jan. 13, the exhibit also includes an onion-skin carbon copy Shackleton made of his proposal seeking money to finance the Endurance expedition.
The object of the expedition was to cross Antarctica on foot from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea through the South Pole.
Written in 1913 and marked “STRICTLY PRIVATE” at the top, his proposal is filled with the patriotic fervor and pride that characterized polar exploration in those days:
“From the sentimental point of view, it is the last great Polar journey that can be made. It will be a greater journey than the journey to the Pole and back, and I feel it is up to the British nation to accomplish this, for we have been beaten at the conquest of the North Pole and beaten at the first conquest of the South Pole. There now remains the largest and most striking of all journeys–the crossing of the continent.”
As it turned out, Shackleton’s devotion to duty and to his men became his greatest accomplishment.
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See video of the Field Museum exhibit and hear from Sarah Rajala, granddaughter of Endurance crew member William Bakewell, at chicagotribune.com.