One hundred years after Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated ship the Endurance set sail for the Antarctic, Sotheby's has announced the auction of a collection of Shackleton literary and historical treasures.
It was on 8 August 1914 that the Endurance and its crew left Plymouth, sailing for the Antarctic in what was set to be the first land-crossing of the southern continent, the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Instead, in what Sotheby's described as "the last voyage of the 'Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration' and the end of an era", the ship was trapped in the pack ice just 85 miles from its destination.
With their ship crushed, and then sunk, the men lived in igloos – with what Shackleton called "dogloos" for their dogs – for months. In South, Shackleton's account of the journey – a rare first edition of which is due to be part of the Sotheby's auction next year – he writes on 27 October 1915, the "end of the Endurance had come".
"It is hard to write what I feel. To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home, and in the Endurance I had centred ambitions, hopes, and desires. Now, straining and groaning, her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career. She is crushed and abandoned after drifting more than 570 miles in a north-westerly direction during the 281 days since she became locked in the ice."
Eventually, the crew would strike out for the uninhabited Elephant Island. "I have stopped issuing sugar now, and our meals consist of seal meat and blubber only, with 7ozs [198g] of dried milk per day for the party," wrote Shackleton.
"Each man receives a pinch of salt, and the milk is boiled up to make hot drinks for all hands. The diet suits us, since we cannot get much exercise on the floe and the blubber supplies heat. Fried slices of blubber seem to our taste to resemble crisp bacon. It certainly is no hardship to eat it, though persons living under civilized conditions probably would shudder at it. The hardship would come if we were unable to get it."
David Goldthorpe, a senior specialist in Sotheby's books and manuscripts department, says that South did not immediately capture the public imagination when Shackleton published it in 1919. "People had sort of had enough of tales of heroism. It was quite a modest publication, printed on fairly low quality paper, so first editions are rather rare," he added.
From Elephant Island, Shackleton and four of his men set out in an open boat to travel the 800 miles to South Georgia. Three months – and four attempts – later, they would return to Elephant Island to rescue all of the Endurance's crew, said Sotheby's.
The auction house said today that next year would see the sale of the first edition of South, which includes 88 photos, as well as the first book printed in the Antarctic, Shackleton's Aurora australis. That book was printed in 1909, in the winter quarters of the British Antarctic Expedition, and bound in wooden boards made from tea chests. The crew had brought a printing press with them from England "to ward off the boredom of overwintering in the perpetual dark", said Sotheby's, which has put an estimate of £30,000 to £40,000 on the book.
A first edition of Shackleton's account of his journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia, once owned by Shackleton's family, will also be part of the auction, as will Shackleton's copy of The Antarctic Manual, used for his Discovery expedition in 1901 – his first journey to the South Pole.
A guide price of up to £15,000 has been put on An Account of the British Antarctic Expedition (1907-1909), also known as the Nimrod expedition, Shackleton's second to the Antarctic. The book is signed by the explorer, and all of the "shore party" who set up base at Cape Royds in February 1908, and illustrated with a drawing of Shackleton by George Marston, the official artist to the expedition.
"They returned back to Britain in 1909 as heroes, having managed to travel further south than man had ever gone before – to within 112 miles of the South Pole," said Sotheby's.
The books are part of a wider auction of over 1,500 rare books about exploration from the collection of Franklin Brooke-Hitching, first announced in March. Sotheby's is selling the books in four collections, as there are so many, with the Shackleton titles to be auctioned next autumn.
According to Sotheby's, Shackleton and his crew were greeted "without honour or ceremony" on their return in 1917, arriving back to Britain in the middle of a world war. Most of the members of the expedition were immediately enlisted into military service. Two later died in action, and another of typhoid on service in the Mediterranean.
"It was the last heroic Antarctic expedition," said Goldthorpe, who described Shackleton as "very good at getting funding – there was a bit of Barnum & Bailey about him; he was quite a showman."