Portal:History/Featured article/February, 2011

The Shackleton–Rowett Expedition (1921–22) was Sir Ernest Shackleton's last Antarctic project, 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 Quest, a converted Norwegian sealer. Shackleton's original plan had been to explore the Beaufort Sea sector of the Arctic Ocean, but this was abandoned after the Canadian government withheld financial support. Quest, smaller than any recent Antarctic exploration vessel, soon proved inadequate for its task, and progress south was delayed by its poor sailing performance and by frequent engine problems. 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 attenuated 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's significance is its standing at the very end of the Heroic Age and the beginning of the "Mechanical Age" that followed. Ultimately, however, the event that defined it in public memory, and overshadowed all its activities, was Shackleton's untimely death.

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