On 17 September 1921

The explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton left London aboard his ship Quest, bound for the Antarctic on what would prove to be his final voyage. His second in command was Frank Wild, himself an experienced Antarctic explorer and previously Shackleton’s second in command on the famous Endurance expedition of 1914.

On the way south, Shackleton died of a heart attack and was buried on South Georgia; Wild took command and led the expedition during its three months in the waters of the eastern Antarctic, as it investigated a mysterious ‘appearance of land’ in the Weddell Sea reported in a previous expedition.

This book, Wild’s account of the voyage of the Quest, is the story of the last expedition in what has become known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration.