The Ross Sea Party - Aurora
Ernest Shackleton - 1914-17

The second part of Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition saw the ship Aurora travel to the Ross Sea area to establish a base and lay food and supply depots along the second leg of the route returning from the South Pole to be used by the trans-polar party when they had exhausted their own supplies. While they would succeed in doing this, Shackleton's sledges never came, the Aurora was blown off shore and drifted in an ice floe for 312 days, those stranded ashore were short on supplies and three of them died.

While Shackleton is widely lauded for his ability to get his men out of the seemingly impossible fix of the Endurance expedition, it is less widely appreciated that his preparations and planning in order to prevent getting into a fix in the first place were sometimes lacking. The Ross Sea party was quite poorly prepared for what they were expected to do and underfunded too, much of the organization was left to a small committee in London led by a lawyer while Shackleton dealt with the Endurance. The expedition ship Aurora was purchased from Douglas Mawson on his return from the Australasian Antarctic Expedition in 1914. The ship was in poor condition, needed repairs and was missing equipment that had to be replaced, two experienced English crew members resigned rather than sail in her leading to local replacements and a crew who were inexperienced in ice work.

In particular the risk of scurvy was not considered and communications were very poor. Despite lessons that should have been learned from earlier Antarctic expeditions the food that was taken and eaten in Antarctica was not selected to prevent scurvy, this led to illness, suffering and eventually the death of one of the expedition, Arnold Spencer-Smith. There were numerous failures of communication between Shackleton and others notably the Ross Sea Party committee, but most surprisingly there was none between Shackleton and the Ross Sea Party at a crucial time. Shackleton said in a newspaper interview in December 1914 that he had no intention of setting off on his trans-polar journey in the 1914-15 summer season, though neither he nor anyone else communicated this to the crew of the Aurora before they left Australia and they thought preparation for this date was paramount.

The Aurora sailed from Hobart, Australia for the Ross Sea on the 24th of December 1914 under the command of Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, she arrived at Ross Island on the 9th of January 1915. Nine days later on the other side of the Antarctic continent the Endurance would become trapped in the ice of the Weddell Sea never to be released.