An exceedingly rare survival from Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, 1907-1909. Inscribed on the front free endpaper: “For the British Antarctic Expedition from Campbell W. MacKellar of Lerags 1907.”
MacKellar was one of the Sponsors of Shackleton’s 1907-09 British Antarctic Expedition, which sailed in the Nimrod. A glacier and the massive mountain (4295m) in the Queen Alexandra Range at its head, were both named in his honour. He also contributed books to Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic expedition.
Expedition copies from the Heroic Age are very desirable indeed and hardly ever appear on the market. This is the first book from a Shackleton led expedition that we have handled. Notably, in 2022 the copy of Robert Browning’s poems that Shackleton also took on the Nimrod, with a similar presentation inscription by an expedition sponsor and RGS member, achieved $96,000 at auction and was described in Potter and Potter’s cataloguing as “the only known surviving copy of a book owned by Shackleton that was taken on one of his major expeditions.”
This copy of Peary’s Nearest the Pole is a significant addition to the known artefacts of Shackleton’s Antarctic journeys. It was not uncommon for ship’s libraries to contain narratives of other explorers which might offer relevant insight into the extreme conditions of the high latitudes. Indeed, it may have even amused Shackleton to see his former ship Discovery weighed up as the “Scotch” example in a table of statistics against her Norwegian and American whaling counterparts. One of the keys to Peary’s success was his willingness to learn from the Inuit, and as such his experiences using sled dogs my also have been instructive - Nimrod was one of the first Antarctic expeditions to employ the dog drawn mode of transportation adapted from Indigenous practices in the Arctic.
Of course, Shackleton and Peary were on parallel journeys in 1907 at opposite ends of the earth. Both were striving not just to be nearest but to be first at their respective poles. One can only imagine how members of the Nimrod expedition felt reading Peary’s call to arms justifying his prior attempt: “As regards the belief expressed by some that the attainment of the North Pole possesses no value or interest let me say that should an American first of all men place the Stars and Stripes at that coveted spot, there is not an American citizen at home or abroad, and there are millions of us, but what would feel a little better and a little prouder of being an American.”
Within the race for the poles, Peary’s narrative also included a meaningful record against which Shackleton could strive to measure his own progress. Peary’s 1906 farthest north was claimed at 87° 06’, and as the Nimrod polar party began to approach the inverse latitude it “was a sign of their fixation with that record and their latitude in general that each of them simultaneously started recording their advance in geographic rather than status miles and their current location began to appear more frequently in their diaries. The following morning [January 2, 1909] Peary’s record was beaten” (Riffenburgh, 228). Their final furthest South of 88° 05’ meant that they returned home, though thwarted in their ultimate goal, as the men who had had come closest to either pole. It must have offered no small comfort to turn to this book and take stock of their achievement.
Riffenburgh, B. Nimrod. Bloomsbury, 2004.
