The same could be said for the entire Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition, of which Stenhouse was a member. Assigned the task of landing a party of men on the southern coast of Antarctica, he had been given orders by Sir Ernest Shackleton, leader of the expedition, to remain moored in the Ross Sea, while a land force sledged north to lay a series of food depots. These depots were to be used by Shackleton’s team, after landing on the opposite coast, for an historic crossing of the Antarctic.

This epic journey would, it was hoped, restore some of Britain’s prestige after the failure of Scott’s bid for the South Pole a few years earlier.

That was the plan but, as Kelly Tyler-Lewis explains in a compelling and compassionately written account of the Ross Sea Party, The Lost Men is what happened instead. Shackleton’s party never reached Antarctica. Instead their ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. The crew were forced to make what is now considered one of the most heroic voyages in human history — covering hundreds of miles of the worst ocean in the world in open lifeboats.

The Ross Sea Party did reach land, but were so under-equipped that, disembarking at the site of Scott’s old base camp, they resorted to eating dog biscuits and made clothing scavenged from abandoned tent canvas. Hanging over the Ross Party expedition leader Aeneas Mackintosh was the burden that, should he fail to lay the depots for Shackleton’s path across Antarctica, the “Boss” was doomed to certain death. Isolated not only from communication with Shackleton but also from a world in which the Great War had already claimed more than a million lives, Mackintosh and his men persevered through weeks of barely conceivable suffering.

The story Tyler-Lewis has to tell is one in which, just as things seem as if they couldn’t possibly get any worse, they do. Returning from a gruelling depot-laying mission to find that their ship had been swept out to sea, the shore party were reduced to near prehistoric living conditions. “Smoke-bleared eyes looked out from gray, haggard faces: their hair was matted and uncut, their beards were impregnated with soot and grease.”

Shackleton’s lack of clarity about the chain of command pitted Mackintosh against his subordinate, Ernest Joyce. “I have never in my experience come across such an idiot in charge of men!” Joyce wrote, while refraining from outright mutiny. In the end, he didn’t have to. Having squandered the lives of the sled dogs, and reduced himself to a scurvy-ridden cripple, Mackintosh was forced at last to relinquish command to Joyce, whose knowledge of polar survival undoubtedly saved the lives of many, but sadly not all of the men in the party.

Tyler-Lewis’s narrative bears the pedigree of exhaustive research at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, as well as the personal experience of having visited Antarctica. She handles the sometimes repetitive nature of the Ross Party’s ordeal with varied perspectives from the diaries of expedition members, delivering a remarkably evenhanded account, not only of the conditions, but of the negligence that caused them.

If there is fault with The Lost Men, it is not in the execution of the book itself but in the fact that much of this story has been told recently by the Australian writer Lennard Bickel in his book Shackleton’s Forgotten Men. The two narratives do place emphasis on different sources. Bickel’s include interviews with an expedition survivor, Richard Richards; Tyler-Lewis had access to the papers of Captain Stenhouse and a collection of documents recently released by the Shackleton family. But those familiar with Bickel’s work might find themselves hard-pressed to justify another book on the same subject.

However, whether there is one book or 20, the fate of the Ross Sea Party deserves to be told and retold. “There are,” wrote the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, “some failures as glorious as successes. Sir Ernest Shackleton’s is one of them”. No less important, no less memorable, is the story of The Lost Men.

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