South. The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914-1917. With Eighty-Eight Illustrations and Diagrams. New York: Macmillan & Co., 1920. First American Edition. Pp xvi, 380. Publisher’s green cloth boards, lettered in gilt. Light shelf-wear to covers, otherwise a nice bright copy.

Illustrated with a colour frontispiece, 86 plates of photographs, 2-page panorama of South Georgia Island, folding colour map; with 2 appendices & an index.

Earnest Shackleton’s most famous expedition was planned to be an attempt to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea south of the Atlantic, to the Ross Sea south of the Pacific, by way of the Pole. It set out from London on 1 August 1914, and reached the Weddell Sea on January 10, 1915, where the pack ice closed in on the Endurance. The ship was broken by the ice on 27 October 1915. The 28 crew members managed to flee to Elephant Island, bringing three small boats with them. All of them survived after Shackleton and five other men (including the legendary Tom Crean)  managed to reach the southern coast of South Georgia in one of the small boats, from where Shackleton organized a rescue operation to bring home the remaining men.

Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton was born February 15, 1874, in Kilkea, County Kildare. He led three expeditions to the Antarctic & died in Grytviken, South Georgia, on 5th January, 1922