22 NOVEMBER 1957, Page 65

Polar Northcliffe

Shackleton. By Margery and James Fisher. (Barrie, 30s.)

IN

spite of sputniks, polar exploration is still o00 nhng. Shackleton Base, occupied by the "3111tIlonWealth Transarctic Expedition, is buz- ling With aircraft and 'sno-cats'; radio contact is excellent, The Tottan has just sailed for Halley oaY with stores and men for the Royal Society ase there. So the Antarctic can still stand up to liter space as an arena for rival explorers and the time is ripe for a book. I can easily imagine the tare and devotion that the authors put into this the,°,?e--the endless research and annotation and ing. If only they had done a bit more editing

10 reduce its terrifying bulk! It has 550 pages With

, ' not very wide margins and not very large Yk,e, heavily footnoted and appendixed. froStill, it is a big subject and the Fishers have Stglii,v_ett it the big treatment. It will become a s dard work on the human side of polar )oration, 1 say human side to distinguish it hen the very many publications under such titles A4so''tia..hreetiHe yroid Zoophytes collected by the British

Expedition . . .'—publications of the

neatest test scientific value which are caviar to the general, and frozen caviar at that. Shackleton has been called 'a real Elizabethan' and 'thegreatest leader that ever came on God's earth bight bar none.' The leadership shines, or you even say glares from every page. Eliza- ettotil an? I think it would be much more accurate call him a real rip-roaring Edwardian, practical

to a large extent ruthless. He was one of the

,!edletters who dragged the nineteenth century %awl; "118 and fighting across the threshold of the twentieth and enjoyed every moment of it. When he returned from the Scott expedition in 1903 he A0111J,Id life dullish. Being assistant editor of the he 01 Magazine was not exciting or profitable. to foresaw a boom in cigarette smoking and tried beoaaet in on it by founding his own company. He ate secretary and treasurer of the Royal Scot- Geographical Society where he rapidly °stalled the telephone, shocking the older geo- graphers, ers. He stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal- iist for Dundee and then he settled for a while , e in an office job for William Beardmore, which was a little more in his line because Beard- ()r eb Was just going into the motor-car industry - Was asnew and challenging. But even looking the design of a new gas engine quickly Gagged and he told a colleague: 'I want to go on further expedition soon. This time I want to e0111rnand it myself.' 111e Fishers • throw up a lot of illuminating quie

Points all adding to their wide-screen picture

. man. Having learned that diet was vital he ,411„, 4,,,,t'i"oYed a M. Oddenino to teach cooking to his „`uld expedition. He experimented with a ,

"tier-driven sledge, hankered after his ice-

'euing motor-car and got it, took an Avro '°et-plane on the Quest and generally banged 114600sIII like a sort of Polar Northcliffe, known as ot L4.instead of Chief. It seems typical that part propagandist under Carson while the rest was spenton supervising equipment and training for North Russian force at Murmansk in 1917-18. an ‘,111' do I do these things? . . . One goes once Sod then one gets the fever and can't stop going. illopt return to the wild again and again until I the f°8e, in the end, the wild will win. There is te,seination of striving after the almost impos lletai This is probably as final a statement on the sr exploration (from the leader's rather than kit ieientist's point of view) as 'because it's there'