Shackleton.

“It is now seven weeks since we first entered the pack ice & since then it has been almost an incessant battle. It is gratifying to feel we are only 80 miles from… Vahsel Bay. We are all keen to reach it as the monotony is telling on some of us.”

— Frank Hurley

On first looking into Chapman’s Homer

MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
  Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
  That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
  When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
  He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

— John Keats, 1816

“I do so wish sometimes, that I could just pop home for an hour or two as easily in the flesh as in the spirit. No doubt the explorers of 2015, if there is anything left to explore, will not only carry their pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes but will also receive their nourishment & warmth by wireless… and also their power to drive their motor sledges, but, of course, there will be an aerial daily excursion to both poles then, & it will be the bottom of the Atlantic, if not the centre of the earth that will form the goal in those days.”

— Thomas Orde-Lees