Author: By David Mehegan, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 3, 1999

Page: M1

Section: Books

Although it is much less well-known, at least in America, one must place the Antarctic epic of Sir Ernest Shackleton in the same league with the great Lewis and Clark Expedition. Shackleton, unlike Lewis and Clark, failed to achieve his stated mission; nevertheless what he did achieve was more impressive: He kept 27 trapped men alive in the frozen polar region for 20 months and in the end brought them all home safely.

The Antarctic was the last unexplored region on earth at the start of the century, and expeditions from several countries vied with one another to reach the South Pole. History best remembers the 1912 race between Britain's Robert Falcon Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen, in which Scott reached the pole only to find that Amundsen had been there first, then froze to death on the return journey. Ernest Shackleton, a genial Anglo-Irish merchant officer, had accompanied Scott's earlier failed 1901 mission and had turned back short of the pole on a 1908 mission of his own.

With the pole reached by Amundsen, Shackleton decided on a new goal: to cross the Antarctic on foot. Having carefully picked the members of his crew, including surgeons, scientists, a dog-handler, a master carpenter, and the great Australian photographer James Frank Hurley, Shackleton set out on the wooden 300-ton barkentine Endurance from Buenos Aires in October 1914 (the ship had been given special permission to leave England in August, despite the outbreak of war). After a stop at the Norwegian whaling station on South Georgia Island, the plan was to land near Vahset Bay, at the edge of the Weddell Sea, cross the continent with dog-drawn sleds, and end at a supply station set up at Cape Royds, on the Ross Sea.

As it happened, they never even landed in Antarctica. The pack ice was heavier that summer than any experienced polar hands could remember. As the Endurance plodded through the ice of the Weddell Sea, it became trapped hopelessly on Jan. 18, 1915.

This is where the epic began. Shackleton knew the original plan was finished; the real challenge now was to escape before winter. The men lived on the ship, hoping for a break in the ice that would permit movement north. But the pressure of the ice became worse, until on Oct. 27 it crushed the ship like kindling. As that was happening, the men evacuated and made camp nearby.

Weirdly, the trapped ship, and then the camp, was drifting northwest in the moving pack ice, hundreds of miles from the point at which southward progress had ended. The party salvaged all they could from the ship, including its three large boats, and made ready to launch them to try to cross to South Georgia Island as soon as the northward-moving ice fell apart around them. They launched the boats in freezing and towering seas April 9, 1916, but after seven days only got as far as Elephant Island, a godforsaken rocky outcropping just north of Antarctica's Palmer Peninsula.

After a short time there, with no hope of rescue, Shackleton decided to make a run for help with one boat. Dividing the party and leaving 21 men on the island under the leadership of his second in command, Frank Wild, Shackleton and five others set out to cross 800 miles of raging ocean in a 22 1/2-foot boat, the James Caird, with a makeshift canvas-covered deck and a two-masted sailing rig. They left Elephant Island April 24 and reached South Georgia May 10, 1916. But they were not safe yet -- they were on the west coast of the island, 22 miles from the Norwegian Stromness station. So they trekked across the unmapped island, west to east, between 10,000-foot mountains and jagged ridges, constantly wet and partly frostbitten, seeking out passes, to reach the Norwegian whaling station on May 20.

But the amazing story does not end here. England was mired in war, and Shackleton found little interest on the home front for an effective early rescue mission to Elephant Island, and when an offer came, it was proposed that a Royal Navy officer would be in charge. Rejecting that plan, Shackleton found a small Chilean tugboat and, with his five crewmates and a cobbled-together crew, steamed back to Elephant Island and, on Aug. 30, 1916, two years after the epic began, rescued the men who had stayed there, maintaining themselves with penguin meat and the springs of water on the island.

The miracle of this expedition was that Shackleton did not lose a single man. His crossing to South Georgia was one of the greatest feats of small-boat navigation ever recorded, and, combined with the the march across South Georgia, it makes a modern-day ascent of Mount Everest seem like a day on the links.

Shackleton never accomplished much after that; like so many of his type, he did not do well in ordinary life. In 1921, he started another Antarctic expedition, with some of his old comrades, but its mission was vague. In any event, he died of a heart attack (his body was worn out from all of his adventures) at South Georgia Island in January 1922, and was buried on the island. He was 47. His friends went on far enough to see the bleak abandoned camp on Elephant Island once more.

Caroline Alexander's book makes use of the fantastic photographs of Hurley, who was dauntless in capturing the men and the scenes of the adventure. Many of these pictures have never been published, and will be part of a Shackleton exhibition opening in March in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Her writing is clear and swift, and she concentrates of the human drama while not slighting the technical and mechanical details.

The two keys to the survival of the party were luck (time after time in reading this book, one thinks, ``That's it, they're dead,'' but then the wind abates and a couple of penguins waddle into camp and offer themselves for dinner) and one secret weapon: Ernest Shackleton. He was a brilliant leader who managed to hold his men together throughout their long ordeal. Unlike the frosty, mercurial, and class-conscious Scott, Shackleton had a gentle and easy manner. He apportioned all duties, rations, and clothing fairly, shared every hardship with his men, and generously took care of them when they were sick or disabled. He was also a shrewd psychologist, making efforts to stroke the egos of men he needed while not hesitating to use his authority in the rare instances of crises in discipline.

Alexander superbly characterizes the other men as well: the crusty ship's carpenter, Henry McNiff, whose brilliant joinery prepared the boats for the voyage north; Frank Worsley, the captain of the Endurance whose accurate navigation on the James Caird amid stormy skies and tossing seas was an astonishing achievement; and Hurley, a brave artist who never lost his sense of the beauty around him even at times of dire danger.

The Shackleton story is almost unbelievable. The crossing from Elephant to South Georgia, amid howling gales and blizzards (a 500-ton steamer in the area sank at the same time), was by itself historic, but the whole epic of survival is incomparable in modern times. One reads this account and looks at these pictures, and thinks, ``No GPS receivers, no radios, no freeze-dried high-energy foods, no Coast Guard helicopters -- no Gore-Tex!'' Just good equipment, good luck to go with bad, and a truly ingenious leader who never gave up or lost his cool or judgment.

One cannot but be struck by the contrast between what was happening in the Antarctic and events in Europe. Looked at in a ``sensible'' way, Shackleton's expedition was crazy and unnecessary -- there was no need to cross the Antarctic. And yet what a noble example it turned out to be. Shackleton was obsessed with keeping 28 men alive. Back in Europe, meanwhile, the leaders of civilization were busily engaged in the opposite endeavor. When he asked the Norwegian station manager at South Georgia when the war had ended, Shackleton was told, ``The war is not over. Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.''

Not the whole world. Out on the unforgiving, glittering ice, there was still sanity, romance, hope, companionship, and tenacious life.