Shackleton–Rowett Expedition

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1. nandinishetye
   

   The Shackleton–Rowett Expedition (1921–22) was the last Antarctic expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the final episode in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. The venture, financed by businessman John Quiller Rowett, is sometimes referred to as the Quest Expedition after its ship, a small converted Norwegian whaler.
   
   The original plan was to explore the Beaufort Sea sector of the Arctic Ocean, but this was changed to the Antarctic after the Canadian government withheld financial support. The expedition objectives were never clearly formulated, but included broadly defined oceanographic and coastal survey work. The ship, smaller than those of any recent Antarctic voyage, proved inadequate for its task; its progress south was delayed by its poor performance and by frequent engine problems, which led to an enforced delay of a month in Rio de Janeiro. Before the expedition's work could properly begin, Shackleton died aboard ship, just after its arrival at the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia.
   
   The major part of the subsequent foreshortened expedition was a three-month cruise to the eastern Antarctic, under the leadership of second-in-command Frank Wild. In these waters the shortcomings of Quest were soon in evidence: slow speed, heavy fuel consumption, a tendency to roll in heavy seas, and a steady leak. The ship was unable to proceed further than longitude 20°E, well short of its easterly target, and its engine's low power was insufficient for it to penetrate far into the Antarctic ice. Following several fruitless attempts to break southwards through the pack ice, Wild returned the ship to South Georgia, after a nostalgic visit to Elephant Island, where he and 21 others had been stranded after the sinking of the ship Endurance, during Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition six years earlier.
   
   Wild had thoughts of a second, more productive season in the ice, and took the ship to Cape Town for a refit. Here he received a message from Rowett ordering the ship home to England, so the expedition ended quietly. Although not greatly regarded in the histories of polar exploration, the Quest voyage is of historical significance, standing at the very end of the Heroic Age and the beginning of the "Mechanical Age" that followed it. Ultimately, the event that defined it in public memory, and overshadowed all its activities, was Shackleton's untimely death.

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