MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

World's best climbers tackle Shackleton's South Georgia feat.

Three of the world's most experienced mountain climbers have paid tribute to the incredible achievement of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton in crossing South Georgia's unmapped mountains in 1916 to enable him to rescue all 27 men of his stranded trans-Antarctic expedition.

Eighty-five years later, the three climbers re-traced Shackleton's journey in far better conditions, with modern clothing and equipment, and up-to-date maps. Their verdict: The "crazy genius of Shackleton's rescue mission" was "one of the most desperate escape stories of all time" involving "unspeakable suffering". The three climbers were tasked to do the climb to "put the achievement in perspective" in the making of a modern IMAX film called "Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure", which will have its Royal Premiere in London attended by Princess Anne on October 18th.

The three men chosen by the film's director for the challenge were Conrad Anker from California, one of America's finest expedition climbers; the Tyrolean climber and Member of the European Parliament, Reinhold Messner - the first person to climb all the world's 8,000-metre summits; and one of Britain's best climbers, Stephen Venables, who has now published an account of their climb, entitled "Island of Endurance". "Like all great stories", Venables writes, "this saga of failure transformed into triumph improves with every re-telling".

The climbers had a formidable back up team when they set off from Montevideo -- five production staff, a four-man camera crew, a sound engineer, an inflatable boat expert, six mountain safety experts, and the crew of their chartered ship, "Akademic Shulyekin".

Shackleton's climb was the culmination of a death-defying 17-month ordeal after his ship "Endurance" was crushed by the ice and sank, involving a trek across the frozen wasteland, escape by lifeboat to Elephant island, then to South Georgia, and finally the crossing of the mountains.

Shackleton, with his two strongest companions, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean, wore the same "filthy, blubber-soot-blackened woollens and windproofs" they had worn for a whole year; wooden staves instead of ice axes; salvaged screws fixed into the soles of their floppy reindeer-skin boots; with two only days' rations stuffed into their pockets, and a primus stove. With only a compass and a torn sheet from an inaccurate coastal map, they completed the terrifying mountain journey in 27 hours non-stop, slithering at speed down the last few hundred metres in the dark to Strom