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A little over 20 years ago when Caroline Alexander's book The Endurance brought Sir Ernest Shackleton back into the public eye, Signet published his books Heart of the Antarctic and South in new paperback editions. With the recent discovery of Shackleton's ship Endurance by a team led by Mensun Bound, I decided it was time to reread South.

While the book opens with the part of the story everyone knows - how the Endurance became trapped in the Weddell Sea, frozen solid in the unyielding ice that would eventually sink her, how Shackleton's unfailing leadership kept his men organized and optimistic, their difficult voyage in three small boats to Elephant Island, and the almost miraculous trip of one of those boats, under the leadership of Shackleton and Endurance's captain Frank Worsley, to South Georgia across the wildest seas on Earth, followed by the trip of three of the men (Shackleton, Worsley, and Tom Crean) across the uncharted, entirely unexplored interior of South Georgia to the whaling stations on the opposite coast, and the final rescue of all of the men waiting on Elephant Island - Shackleton also tells the other part of the story that isn't nearly as familiar. Shackleton's intent was to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, and on the other side of the continent the ship Aurora and a second group of men were set to the job of placing supply depots for the use of the polar team on the final part of their journey. Disaster struck almost immediately. Shackleton does not place blame, but the leadership of the Ross Sea team was not nearly so solid as his own, and before all of the supplies could be put ashore, the Aurora was swept out to sea in a gale and prevented from returning by the ice - with much of the supplies and many men still on board (like Endurance she too spent several months frozen in the pack, but survived). It is to the credit of the Ross Sea team that they did the best they could laying depots that would never be used thanks to the disaster to the Endurance. While it's often pointed out that Shackleton lost not a man, in fact three men died on this part of the expedition - one man who probably died of effects from scurvy on a depot laying expedition, and leader Aeneas Mackintosh and another man who chose to take a shortcut over sea ice which broke up as they were crossing it. Shackleton tells the story of this part of the expedition well, although in not so much detail as the part he was personally involved with.

The book is well done - no typos, and several pages of the classic photographs taken by Australian Frank Hurley. One issue I have is that the book is essentially as presented by Shackleton in 1919. The book definitely needed some additional apparatus - a list of the full names and short biographies of the crew would have been very helpful.

There are a lot of books about this expedition but if you start here and with Frank Worsley's books you'll find a lot of good, gripping reading. And I highly recommend Shackleton's book about his earlier expedition, Heart of the Antarctic, as well.