From back cover: The story of Ernest Shackleton's epic journey toward the South Pole. Lacking funds and plagued by hunger, cruiel weather, and unpredictable terrain, Shackleton and his party accomplished some of the most remarkable feats in the history of exploration. Not only were members of the expedition the first to climb the active volcano Mout Erebus and the first to reach the South Magnetic Pole, but Shackleton himself led a party of four that trudged hundreds of miles across uncharted wastelands and up to the terrible Antarctic Plateau ... only ninety-seven miles from the South Pole itself.