Ernest Shackleton
Early

Before the return of Shackleton's body to South Georgia, there was a memorial service held for him with full military honours at Holy Trinity Church, Montevideo, and a service was held on 2 March 1922 at St Paul's Cathedral, London, at which King George V and other members of the royal family were represented. Within a year, the first biography was published: The Life of Sir Ernest Shackleton by Hugh Robert Mill. As well as being a tribute to the explorer, this book was a practical effort to assist his family; Shackleton had died some £40,000 in debt (equivalent to £ 2,758,944 in 2023). A further initiative was the formation of a Shackleton Memorial Fund, which was used to assist with his children's education and the support of his mother.

Shackleton's death marked the end of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, a period of discovery characterised by journeys of geographical and scientific exploration in a largely unknown continent without any of the benefits of modern travel methods or radio communication. None of his voyages achieved its primary objective, and over the ensuing decades, his status as a polar hero was generally outshone by that of Scott, whose polar party had by 1925 been commemorated on more than 30 monuments in Britain alone, including stained glass windows, statues, busts and memorial tablets. A statue of Shackleton designed by Charles Sargeant Jagger was unveiled at the Kensington headquarters of the RGS in 1932, but public memorials to him were relatively few. The printed word saw much more attention given to Scott—a forty-page booklet titled "Shackleton in the Antarctic", published in 1943 by OUP as part of a "Great Exploits" series, is described by cultural historian Stephanie Barczewski as "a lone example of a popular literary treatment of Shackleton in a sea of similar treatments of Scott". This disparity continued into the 1950s.

In the preface to his 1922 book The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of Scott's team on the Terra Nova Expedition, wrote: "For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organisation, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time". This statement was paraphrased by Sir Raymond Priestley, one of Shackleton's contemporaries, in his 1956 address to the British Science Association, thus: "Scott for scientific method, Amundsen for speed and efficiency but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton."
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