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Comment by EdwardDiego | Hacker News Reader

Shackleton is the polar explorer I respect the most, mainly for the fact that no-one had to walk heroically to their deaths in a blizzard on any of his expeditions.

Even if you think Erebus shouldn't have been there, the efforts to keep everyone alive get a big thumps up from me.

(Also, his ponies did way better than Scott's, Scott rejected what worked for Shackleton: https://captainantarctica.com.au/meat-eating-horses-of-antar...)

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> Shackleton is the polar explorer I respect the most, mainly for the fact that no-one had to walk heroically to their deaths in a blizzard on any of his expeditions.

Isn't this true for Nansen as well?

Shackleton is right up there with Nansen and Amundsen.

Amundsen lost his life trying to help Umberto Nobile and Nobile's crew.

I dispute the notion that Shackleton was an explorer. His career was marked by incredibly dangerous expeditions whose goals were primarily glory and fame. His ability to lead and inspire people to join his adventures is more akin to being a really good cult leader.

I understand that, my two favourite New Zealand explorers (Charlie Douglas and George Dobson), are both very obscure but very admirable IMO - and they're obscure because they were the furthest from glory hounds that you can get. If you can get a hold of this book[0], it's a very interesting read (well, for me, anyway, being a Kiwi and all, especially the chapter where the editor collated Charlie Douglas' diary writings on our native birds, and what they were like for eating, which features some of our now rarest birds, he was quite fond of the flavour of kākāpō[1][2], which is critically endangered now). This article might be easier to access than an out of print book.[3]

But, so many explorers that were contemporaries of Shackleton, like Amundsen, Nansen, Byrd, Scott, etc. _were_ glory hounds. Does that negate their exploration? I mean, it often meant that they took stupid risks to be "first", fully agree there. But if we eliminate the glory-hound polar explorers, there's precious few left.

[0]: https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/engage/cup/catalogue/books/mr-e...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kākāpō

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY

[3]: https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/travels-with-mr-explorer-dougl...

any books you can recommend on historical polar expeditions?

Try "The Worst Journey in the World" [1], there are eBook links from the wiki page.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World

But skip the chapter about what Scott's wife was doing in his absence. The evidence suggests it is all fabrication.

Around the same time period as Scott's crew were dying of scurvy, Japanese naval crews were dropping like flies from malnutrition for insisting on eating white rice and nothing but. And pellagra gripped the American south.

Although it's a fictional novel, I really like The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.

Another fiction is The Terror: https://www.librarything.com/work/1499548

Season 1 of The Terror TV show is fairly faithful to the book too. It's a pretty fascinating read.

The history on the ship itself is also quite interesting.[0] A repurposed bomb ship from the war of 1812, just to feature one aspect.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Terror_(1813)

That was great. Season 2 lost me a bit, but Season 1 was top notch. And not just because I decided I love Jared Harris in everything after seeing him in The Expanse as a leader of an OPA faction, and then seeing him in Chernobyl.

I've just purchased Ranulph Fiennes' biography of Shackleton and definitely recommend that one, also I really enjoyed Endurance by Alfred Lansing, also about Shackleton's expedition.

Fiennes' also wrote a good book about Amundsen and Scott, Race to the Pole.

I've heard good things about "Mawson's Will" by Lennard Bickel.

(I tend to focus on Antarctica due to its proximity and the historical connections to Antarctic exploration in my area)

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