EXPLORATION: Some of Ernest Shackleton's family intimates called him "Mike", a name that seems altogether better matched to the kind of man we're told he was."For science, trust Scott," runs an apothegm still quoted on Antarctic occasions, "for sport, go for Amundsen; but if you want someone to help you out of a hole, call for Shackleton."
The ultimate in helping people out of a hole was, of course, Shackleton's heroic voyage in the ship's boat, James Caird, from Antarctica's Elephant Island to South Georgia, with a final marathon over a mountain to reach the whaling station. The story was to make great television, watched in Ireland with special appreciation because two Irishmen, Tom Crean and Tim McCarthy, were at the explorer's side.
Shackleton's own credentials as an Irishman are considerable and offer an intriguing licence for yet another account of his life and adventures, skilfully assembled and illustrated with flair in a well-made book. Jonathan Shackleton, a cousin of the explorer and an Antarctic guide and lecturer, lives in Co Cavan, and John McKenna, the writer, shares his county of birth with the hero of his biography.
The first decade of Shackleton's childhood was spent at Kilkea House, in south Co Kildare, the second of 10 children fathered by an unsuccessful gentleman farmer, later a GP in London. But if the explorer's parents were fairly unremarkable, they connected to two distinctive streams in Irish history.
The Shackletons were Quakers who had founded a boarding school in Ballitore, 30 miles from Dublin in Co Kildare, in 1726; among the early alumni were Edmund Burke, Napper Tandy and the future Cardinal Cullen. On the other side of the family, the mother was a Fitzmaurice descended from a Norman baron of Kerry. "These two family lines," suggest the authors, "hard-working Quaker pacifists and hot-blooded adventurers, were to find a perfect point of fusion in Ernest." So much for the right sort of genes, but how about a gift for man-management and logistics? His early life, documented in some detail, explains a lot: ship's boy on cargo clippers, steady progress up the ranks.
Never mind the poetry-quoting and taking the wheel in a storm, it was checking the cargo, learning to give orders, keeping on good terms in difficult conditions that laid the basis of competence and comradely concern.
When it comes to true grit, however, do they make heroes like they used to? The new book is no hagiography - Shackleton's mistresses and drinking binges in the rudderless years between expeditions get at least passing mention (along with the incidental scandal of brother Frank and the theft of the Irish "crown jewels") - but the search for what made this explorer tick takes the authors into well-worn, war-memorial language.
Quoting his powerful recruitment speech to a worshipping audience in Sydney, they conclude: "The ideals of heroism, patriotism and fighting the good fight were the same that had driven him south. The concept of looking into your soul and finding a personal truth by which to steer had long been part of his credo". Such analysis prompts thoughts about the labels provided for personal ideals at particular cultural junctures. How many of Shackleton's virtues, how much of his driving sense of duty, were shaped in his own mind by classical education, Homeric poetry, Anglican metaphor? They seem to have been scarcely adequate, however, to the demands of domestic life.
With so much available narrative, so many diaries, log-books and biographies, any new life of Ernest Shackleton could be almost as long as the author chose to make it. This book errs, if at all, on the side of economy: the whole James Caird adventure takes up a scant four pages. But in its balance between Irish connections and the substance of Shackleton's life and adventures, it justifies itself as something fresh and worth doing. Along with unfamiliar pictures from family archives come well-judged, full-page favourites, such as those from Frank Hurley's camera of Endurance stuck majestically fast in the ice.
Shackleton: An Irishman in Antarctica. By Jonathan Shackleton and John McKenna. Lilliput, 208 pp. €24.99
Michael Viney is a writer and an Irish Times columnist