orn in Country Kildare, Ireland, Earnest Henry Shackleton lived in Dublin until his family moved to England. One of 11 children, Shackleton spent three years at Dulwich College in London and joined the British Merchant Navy at the age of 16.

His career as an explorer began during the golden age of polar exploration, when heroic explorers like England’s Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Norway’s Roald Amundsen mounted expeditions aimed at the South Pole. The pole was a scientific curiosity—the point in Antarctica where a magnetic needle dipped due south. A 19th-century German physicist had put the pole precisely at 66° south, 146° east. But the pole was more mythic than geographic, becoming a mythical place for planting a nation’s conquering flag.

In 1901 Scott sought the pole, and he picked two men to join him: Edward Wilson, a physician, and Ernest Shackleton, a 27-year-old third officer of the merchant service. Scott’s expedition ended when the three starving, half-dead men got to 82° 17’ south, 745 miles from the pole. Knowing he and his companions would die if they pressed on, Scott turned back. Shackleton, spitting blood and suffering from scurvy, was invalided out of the expedition and sent home in a supply ship.

Undaunted, Shackleton organized his own polar expedition and in 1908 led a sleding party to within 97 miles of the South Pole. Because his men were suffering—snowblinded, starving, frostbitten—he decided to turn back. As the man who had nearly reached the pole, he returned to England a national hero and was knighted.

As Sir Earnest was preparing for his next expedition, Scott and Norwegian Roald Amundsen began a race to the pole. Both set out in October 1910. On January 16, 1912, as Scott’s party neared the pole, he saw the tracks of Amundsen’s expedition and knew he had lost the race. Amundsen had reached the pole on December 14. Amundsen’s party survived; Scott and his four companions died while trying to return to base.

With the South Pole now reached, Shackleton turned to a new goal: an overland crossing of Antarctica. He purchased a 300-ton wooden bark and named her the Endurance, after his family motto—Fortitudine Vincimus: “by Endurance we conquer.” The Endurance set sail from England on August 8, 1914 to begin a 22-month epic—one of exploration’s greatest stories of survival. Shackleton got all of his men out of Antarctica alive and did not succeed in crossing the continent. (That was not accomplished until 1957, by Vivian Fuchs, leading a British Commonwealth expedition using tracked vehicles and aerial support.)

Shackleton’s fame endured not because he was an explorer but because he was a leader who saved his men from almost certain death. “For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott;...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,“ said Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a member of the expedition.

In late 1921, Shackleton and a number of his men from the Endurance sailed again toward the Antarctic, stopping on South Georgia Island. There, on January 5, 1922, Shackleton died in his sleep after a massive heart attack. At the request of his wife, he was buried on the island in the whalers’ cemetery.