The 1923 1st edition of Shackleton's Last Voyage, Frank Wild’s account of Shackleton’s final expedition, is a very rare book - and copies signed by expedition members are almost impossible to find. This one is signed by ‘J. A. McIlroy’, followed by the dedication 'To Zelma, with love from Jim’. James McIlroy was the Quest expedition’s surgeon and long-time friend and comrade of Ernest Shackleton. He was with Shackleton when he died suddenly aboard the Quest while anchored in Grytviken harbour off South Georgia in the early hours of 5th January 1922.
James Archibald McIlroy (1879-1968), usually known as Jim, or even less formally ‘Mick’, was a British surgeon and a key member of Sir Ernest Shackleton's crew on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1916). He was born in Ulster, and in the late 1880s his family moved to Kings Norton, near Birmingham. He was educated at King Edward VI Camphill Boys’ School and earned his medical degree at the University of Birmingham. He took up a position at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham before spending a number of years practising medicine in Japan and Egypt and serving as a medical officer aboard ships in the East Indies. McIlroy then became a Medical Officer in the Straits Settlements of the Malaysian Peninsula. It was during a period of sick leave back in England, suffering from malaria, that McIlroy heard about the upcoming Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. He applied and Shackleton immediately interviewed him in London. During the interview, McIlroy could not stop shivering due to the malaria, and Shackleton insisted that he pass a medical exam before he was considered. McIlroy agreed, got a friend who was also a physician to pass him as fit, and was hired as the second surgeon. Shackleton did not tell McIlroy that nobody else had applied for the post.
McIlroy was described by the author Alfred Lansing as "a handsome, aristocratic-looking individual" who was seen by his fellow crew as a "man of the world”, and entertained them with stories of his exploits sailing around the world. He also played the banjo in the team's musical ensemble. During the voyage aboard Endurance, McIlroy was responsible for one of six dog teams, but did not have to deal with many medical problems. Later, while stranded and awaiting rescue on Elephant Island, he and fellow surgeon Alexander Macklin were kept very busy, dealing with numerous conditions, including frostbite, heart trouble, abscesses, nervous breakdown, hand infections, and major surgery - McIlroy was the surgeon who performed the amputation of Perce Blackborow's gangrenous toes, with Macklin serving as anaesthetist, carefully administering a tiny quantity of salvaged chloroform as anaesthesia. For his contributions throughout the expedition, McIlroy was later awarded the silver Polar Medal.
After returning to England McIlroy was commissioned as a temporary Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in January 1917, serving in Italy and France before being seriously wounded at Ypres. After lengthy recuperation, with frequent visits from Shackleton, McIlroy was invalided out of the army and rejoined Shackleton and Frank Wild in a covert surveillance mission to Spitsbergen, from which Shackleton was diverted to a military assignment with the North Russia Expeditionary Force in 1918. It was around this time that McIlroy and Frank Wild embarked on their next venture, joining up with Frank Bickerton (a member of Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition) to purchase a cotton farm in Nyasaland. Bickerton later left after contracting malaria, but McIlroy and Wild remained in Africa until they joined the Shackleton-Rowett Quest Antarctic Expedition of 1921-2. It was during this expedition, while at anchor in Grytviken harbour in South Georgia, that Macklin summoned him to Shackleton's cabin in the early hours of January 5th 1922, only for Shackleton to die moments later.
After returning from the Quest Expedition, McIlroy went back to sea with the Orient Line (later merged into P&O), for whom he eventually became chief surgeon. During the Second World War he nearly lost his life when the ship he was serving in, S.S. Oronsay, was torpedoed off the coast of West Africa. McIlroy and some of the crew spent five days drifting in an open boat before they were picked up by a Vichy-French vessel and were interned as Prisoners of War for a short time. After McIlroy finally had to retire from P&O due to his age, he moved to Aberystwyth where he lived with his twin sister Ruby. But he later returned to sea with the Clan Line, a merchant shipping company, and continued to work at sea until his late seventies. James McIlroy died in 1968, aged 88.
Shackleton’s Last Voyage is a handsome volume - with decorated endpapers, a colour frontispiece, and 100 photographs. The expedition which it chronicles marked the end of the golden age of antarctic exploration. Led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, “The Boss” as he was known to his crew, the Shackleton–Rowett Expedition of 1921–22 was financed by John Quiller Rowett, and is usually referred to as the Quest Expedition after its ship Quest, a converted Norwegian sealer. Shackleton had originally intended to go to the Arctic and explore the Beaufort Sea, but this plan was abandoned when the Canadian government withheld financial support; Shackleton then switched his attention to the Antarctic. Quest, smaller than any recent Antarctic exploration vessel, soon proved inadequate for its task, and progress south was delayed by its poor sailing performance and by frequent engine problems. Disaster struck before the expedition's work could begin, when Shackleton died suddenly on board the ship, on 5th January 1922, just after its arrival at South Georgia. He was buried at his wife's request in the whaler's cemetery in Grytviken, South Georgia.
The major part of the subsequent expedition was a three-month cruise to the eastern Antarctic, under the leadership of the party's second-in-command, Frank Wild. The shortcomings of Quest were soon in evidence: slow speed, heavy fuel consumption, a tendency to roll in heavy seas, and a steady leak. The ship was unable to proceed further than longitude 20°E, well short of its easterly target, and its engine's low power, coupled with its unsuitable bows, meant it could not continue southward through the pack ice. Following several fruitless attempts, Wild returned the ship to South Georgia, on the way visiting Elephant Island where he and 21 others (including J. A. McIlroy) had been stranded after the sinking of the ship Endurance, during Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition six years earlier. Wild had thoughts of a second, more productive season in the ice, and took the ship to Cape Town for a refit. Here, in June 1922, he received a message from Rowett ordering the ship home to England, so the expedition ended quietly. The Quest voyage is not greatly regarded in the history of polar exploration, with the tragedy of Shackleton's untimely death overshadowing everything else.
