January 16

On the 16th in 1909, the British Imperial Antarctic Expedition headed by Ernest Shackleton, commonly called the Nimrod expedition[ii] reached the magnetic South Pole. With Shackelton were George Buckley, Frank Wild, Eric Marshall, Jameson Adams, Raymond Edward Priestley and Edgeworth David. Shackleton’s group would not at this time reach the South Pole. He did however take some solace in being the first men to reach further south than anyone else at the time. Shackleton was able to take it as well as he did because he felt that it was “better a live donkey than a dead lion".
As a result of this expedition, on December 14, 1909 Shackleton would be knighted.
The adventure was called the Nimrod expedition after the ship, the Nimrod, which had carried them to Antarctica.
It certainly seems that if someone gets it into their head to write something nothing will stop them. In a hut that they built near the magnetic South Pole, Shackleton’s group wrote, typeset and printed on a small hand press the 120-page book Aurora Australis, the first book published in Antarctica.
In 1901 Wild was a member of Robert Falcon Scott’s crew as a seaman on the ”Discovery”, along with Ernest Shackleton who was then a Lieutenant.
[v] In 1892, David was appointed head of the geology section of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science in Hobart, Australia.