Today in History—March 5: The Expedition That Summited Mt. Erebus

Today in 1908 a group of men set out to climb a volcano.

They were part of Ernest Shackleton’s British Antarctic expedition aboard the 200-ton Nimrod, which had departed England the previous summer. The expedition would come to define successful Antarctic exploration.

By January the ship was frozen in pack ice in the Ross Sea, and the men established a base at Cape Royds. They assembled the hut they’d brought and transferred supplies from their ship over the ice shelf with the help of a motorcar—the first automobile in Antarctica.

In March, 6 of the 15 crew members—Douglas Mawson, Edgeworth David, Jameson Adams, Philip Brocklehurst, Alistair Mackay, and Eric Marshall—trudged the roughly 12 miles to Mt. Erebus, the southernmost active volcano in the world. They began their journey with sleds of supplies. By 5,500 feet up, they’d moved everything to their backs. The weather turned before they reached 10,000 feet. A blizzard pinned them down as temps dropped to 50 degrees below. Brocklehurst’s feet were badly frostbitten, but the group held on.

After 30 hours, the weather cleared. The men (minus Brocklehurst, who remained lower) reached the summit—13,120 feet—on March 10. They stood at the crater’s edge and peered down into the churning depths of the volcano, which were steaming and belching gas. They collected samples and data. Then they glissaded (read: slid) down.

In October members of the same expedition made a dash for the South Pole, some 1,500 miles away. By January 1909 the men were failing because of dysentery, scurvy, and near-starvation rations. Shackleton calculated that they had enough food left to reach the South Pole—but not enough to make the return trip.

Months earlier on Mt. Erebus, his men had shown how to walk the edge and come back from it.

Just 97 geographic miles from the pole, Shackleton made one of the most famous calls in exploration history: he turned around. Not a single life was lost.

They didn’t reach the pole, but they mapped a 1,700-mile path for those who would.

When his wife asked how he felt about turning back, Shackleton said, “I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.”