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circulation; marketing and merchandising, as mentioned above, were employed both to raise cash and to boost an explorer’s standing; and journals were published always with an eye to sensation and sales. Public opinion could make or break a man far more effectively than anything he did or did not do. An outstanding example was the dispute of 1909, in which Robert Peary and Frederick Cook claimed simultaneously to have been first to the North Pole. After a protracted controversy, the newspapers came out in favor of Peary. In fact, neither man had reached the spot. They were both liars; but Peary was the more skillful self-promoter. While Cook skulked in disgrace, his fellow fraud was greeted as a hero and conqueror. Peary’s publicity machine was so powerful that when he departed for the North Pole, newspapers suggested he was engaged in a race with Shackleton, who was currently marching towards the South Pole. Although the race existed only in Peary’s imagination, he won it all the same. Both came within the same distance of their respective goals; but Peary was able to fabricate his conquest while Shackleton, accompanied by trained observers, was not.
    There exists a photograph taken in 1912, at a banquet given in honor of Amundsen’s conquest of the South Pole. There stands Peary, a towering figure clad in a fur-collared coat, grinning wolfishly at the camera. Beside him stands tiny Shackleton: a tubby, unsmiling man, buttoned into his Titanic-era suit. It is a unique portrait of triumph and disappointment—one, though, that has Ozymandian resonance. At the time Peary was one of the most famous people on earth, Shackleton the eternal also-ran, doomed always to stand in the shadow (here, quite literally) of others. Now Peary is the forgotten man, the discredited impostor, while Shackleton is the hero. If Shackleton does owe his current standing to hype, then there is a glorious justice to it—a justice, moreover, that has a quaintly British flavor: in a world that worships success, we are glorifying a man who was a failure. And, frankly, why not?

TO
MY COMRADES
WHO FELL IN THE WHITE WARFARE
OF THE SOUTH AND ON THE
RED FIELDS OF FRANCE
AND FLANDERS

Preface
    After the conquest of the South Pole by Amundsen, who, by a narrow margin of days only, was in advance of the British Expedition under Scott, there remained but one great main object of Antarctic journeyings—the crossing of the South Polar continent from sea to sea.
    When I returned from the Nimrod Expedition on which we had to turn back from our attempt to plant the British flag on the South Pole, being beaten by stress of circumstances within ninety-seven miles of our goal, my mind turned to the crossing of the continent, for I was morally certain that either Amundsen or Scott would reach the Pole on our own route or a parallel one. After hearing of the Norwegian success I began to make preparations to start a last great journey—so that the first crossing of the last continent should be achieved by a British Expedition.
    We failed in this object, but the story of our attempt is the subject for the following pages, and I think that though failure in the actual accomplishment must be recorded, there are chapters in this book of high adventure, strenuous days, lonely nights, unique experiences, and, above all, records of unflinching determination, supreme loyalty, and generous self-sacrifice on the part of my men which, even in these days that have witnessed the sacrifices of nations and regardlessness of self on the part of individuals, still will be of interest to readers who now turn gladly from the red horror of war and the strain of the last five years to read, perhaps with more understanding minds, the tale of the White Warfare of the South. The struggles, the disappointments, and the endurance of this small party of Britishers, hidden away for nearly two years in the fastnesses of the Polar ice, striving to carry out the ordained task and ignorant of the