South. The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition, 1914-1917

London: William Heinemann, 1920. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. London, William Heinemann, March 1920 (first edition, fourth impression)/ November 1919. Royal octavo, xxii (last blank), 376 pages with 6 sketch maps (one full-page) plus a colour frontispiece with a captioned tissue-guard, a double-page panorama, 86 full-page plates and a large folding map. Silver-pictorial dark blue cloth, top edge dyed blue; covers a little flecked, with slight wear to the extremities; edges foxed, with occasional scattered foxing elsewhere; some light pencilling (mainly marginal emphases against passages of text describing scenes depicted in the plates, with numbers relative to the order in the list of plates); old repair with clear tape (now discoloured) to a short tear to a blank portion of the folding map near the stub; minor signs of age and use; overall, a very good copy with the trimmed pictorial front panel of the dustwrapper (now mounted on brown paper) loosely inserted. The Imperial Transantarctic Expedition of 1914-17 comprised two teams, the Weddell Sea party in the 'Endurance' and the Ross Sea party in the 'Aurora'. 'An essential aspect of Shackleton's scheme for crossing the Antarctic was that a second and quite separate expedition should establish a base on the Ross Sea to provide support for the transantarctic party and establish forward depots'. Things went horribly wrong for both parties, with the 'Endurance' fragmenting under the pressure of being locked in the ice of the Weddell Sea, resulting in the famous journey of survival that culminated in the epic voyage of the 22-foot boat 'James Caird' to South Georgia Island. Shackleton then learned that the men of the Ross Sea party were stranded on Ross Island. When the relief expedition finally reached them, two members of the party had perished. Shackleton returned 'to England in May 1917 and dictated the text of the popular account of the expedition to Edward Saunders, largely from recollection. Final editing was carried out by Leonard Hussey, with personal accounts by Mackintosh, Stenhouse and others, and the book was finally published in 1919' (Howgego, Volume 3).

'This exploit, which has captured the modern imagination, certainly struck the world differently in 1919; in the aftermath of the First World War feats of extraordinary heroism were thick on the ground, and so Shackleton's truly remarkable tale of survival at the extremes of human endurance largely fell flat. This is emphasised in the book's production: the first issue contained cheap paper prone to severe browning, a poorly crafted binding likely to split at the joints with normal usage and silver printing on the binding subject to oxidizing' (The Taurus Collection, 2001). Rosove, when comparing the second impression (December 1919), the third impression issued a month later, and this fourth impression (see Rosove 308.A4) with the first, records they have 'similar binding, superior paper, errors corrected, without the errata slip'. He also notes that this impression has '2 additional pages in the preliminaries (pp. xxiii-xxiv) listing expedition members, plus an addendum on the last index page concerning honors given to Macklin and Orde-Lees'. Thus, a superior item for a fraction of the price! Provenance: E.F. Pollock, with his signature on the front free endpaper (above a date later overwritten incorrectly as 1918). We have previously handled a copy of a booklet by Randolph Bedford, 'The Great Barrier Reef.... A Series of Photographs by E.F. Pollock and Frank Hurley', published by Art in Australia Ltd. in 1928.