Several other members of the crew served in the war and survived it. Alfred Cheetham, the third officer, was killed in the North Sea in 1918, torpedoed by a German submarine — another Antarctic veteran taken by a different kind of cold water. The expedition’s cook, Charles Green, later gave more than a thousand public lectures about his experiences; the stories he told were of ice and penguins and banjo music, not of the war that surrounded them.
The war is also why the Endurance story was not immediately celebrated with the recognition it deserved. The expedition returned to a world in which survival stories were everywhere — in the trenches of Belgium and France, in the North Sea, in Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia. The particular survival of 28 men in the Antarctic, however extraordinary by the standards of polar exploration, competed for public attention with a catastrophe on a scale that made individual survival unremarkable.
Shackleton’s book South, published in 1919, appeared in the immediate aftermath of the war and was reviewed respectfully but without the fanfare that might have attended an Antarctic survival story in peacetime. The expedition’s full recognition as one of the defining survival achievements of the twentieth century came gradually, through the work of later writers and historians, and accelerated with Alfred Lansing’s 1959 account Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, which introduced the story to a generation that had not grown up with it.
The timing matters. The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition left at the beginning of one of history’s great catastrophes, survived in isolation from it, and returned to find a world fundamentally changed. The men who returned were not the same men who had left, and the world they returned to was not the same world they had departed.