Chasing Shackleton: Re-Creating the World's Greatest Journey of Survival

“Mr. Jarvis’s tribute to Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition has had a danger and heroism that are worthy of the original.” —The Guardian

In this extraordinary adventure memoir and tie-in to the PBS documentary, Tim Jarvis, one of the world's leading explorers, describes his modern-day journey to retrace, for the first time ever—and in period clothing and gear—the legendary 1914 expedition of Sir Ernest Shackleton.

In early 1914, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his team sailed for Antarctica, attempting to be the first to reach the South Pole. Instead of glory, Shackleton and his crew found themselves in an epic struggle for survival: a three-year odyssey on the ice and oceans of the Antarctic that endures as one of the world’s most famous tales of adventure, endurance, and leadership ever recorded.

In the winter of 2013, celebrated explorer Tim Jarvis, a veteran of multiple polar expeditions, set out to recreate Sir Ernest Shackleton’s treacherous voyage over sea and mountain, outfitted solely with authentic equipment—clothing, boots, food, and tools—from Shackleton’s time, a feat that has never been successfully accomplished.

Chasing Shackleton is the remarkable record of Jarvis and his team’s epic journey. Beautifully designed and illustrated with dozens of photographs from the original voyage and its modern reenactment, it is a visual feast for readers and historians alike, and an essential new chapter in the story that has inspired adventurers across every continent for a century.

Explorer and environmental scientist Tim Jarvis has made four previous expeditions to Antarctica and the high Arctic. His re-creation of Sir Douglas Mawson’s 1913 trek across Antarctica was made into an award-winning documentary, Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica. In 1999, Jarvis made the fastest unsupported trek to the South Pole, arriving in 47 days, and in 2001, he completed the first unsupported crossing of Australia’s Great Victoria Desert, covering 1,100 kilometers in less than a month. In 2009, he was selected for Yale University’s World Fellows program. A member of the Order of Australia, Jarvis lives in Adelaide, Australia, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their young family.