2-693-840 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'The Gap - New Land. The Party Ascended Mount Hope and Sighted the Great Glacier, Up Which They Marched Through The Gap. The Main Body of the Glacier Joins the Barrier Further to the Left', 1908, (1909). The southern reaches of the Great Ice Barrier with Mt Hope and the Gateway to the Great Glacier. Flat ice field in foreground. Snow-covered mountains in distance. Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) made three expeditions to the Antarctic. During the second expedition, 1907-1909, he and three companions established a new record, Farthest South latitude at 88°S, only 97 geographical miles (112 statute miles, or 180 km) from the South Pole, the largest advance to the pole in exploration history. Members of his team also climbed Mount Erebus, the most active volcano in the Antarctic. Shackleton was knighted by King Edward VII for these achievements. He died during his third and last 'oceanographic and sub-antarctic' expedition, aged 47. Illustration from The Heart of the Antarctic, Vol. I, by E. H. Shackleton, C.V.O. [William Heinemann, London, 1909]