Explorer Tim Jarvis to recreate Ernest Shackleton's 1916 Antarctic journey
Polar explorer Tim Jarvis plans to lead a team in 'the biggest survival journey of them all'
A polar explorer who retraced Douglas Mawson's Antarctic trek has launched an ambitious new challenge - recreating Ernest Shackleton's perilous crossing of the Southern Ocean.
Tim Jarvis, a British-Australian adventurer who in 2007 re-enacted Mawson's 1912 solo trek across the frozen continent, is planning a similar trip next month to follow Shackleton's dramatic 1916 voyage.
Jarvis described the perilous 800 nautical mile Southern Ocean crossing in a spartan lifeboat and punishing traverse of South Georgia Island with very basic gear and rations as "the biggest survival journey of them all".
Shackleton had hoped to complete the first land crossing of the Antarctic when his ship, the Endurance, was crushed by ice, triggering a desperate mission on a lifeboat from nearby Elephant Island to South Georgia for help.
The adventurer and five other men made it across the hostile ocean with little more than the clothes on their backs and the most basic of rations. They battled across the rugged island to a whaling station to raise the alarm.
It was a two-year ordeal that "well and truly bookmarked the end of the heroic era of exploration that started in 1895 when the first person set foot on the Antarctic and finished with the first world war", Jarvis said.