Charming response of the great Antarctic explorer to a fan letter sent by the later renowned crime writer. Following the publication of The Heart of the Antarctic in October 1909, Shackleton embarked on a twelve month programme of speaking tours "to include lectures at one hundred and twenty-three different places in Europe and America, involving 20,000 miles of travelling, and the addressing of audiences of a quarter of a million" (Mill, The Life of Sir Ernest Shackleton, p.167). The present letter was written at the outset of the the last phase of this marathon undertaking, a final tour of continental Europe, "Leaving Lady Shackleton in a furnished house at Sheringham which rejoiced in the name of Mainsail-Haul, reminiscent of the sea, Shackleton spent the whole month of November in Germany and the adjoining countries, delivering twenty-five lectures in German, of which he had now acquired a practical mastery. There was much travelling, for he visited all the towns of importance from the Rhine to Posen and Konigsberg, and in addition Vienna, Prague, and Gratz in Austria, and Bâle and Zurich in Switzerland" (p.179). Seventeen year-old Dorothy L. Sayers was a member of a party from Godolphin School that attended Shackleton's lecture at County Hall in Salisbury in October, one of the last of the British stage of this tour, and was evidently smitten with the great explorer, writing to her parents; "I must relate the event of the week - Shackleton's lecture on Tuesday. It was simply wonderful - I had never seen a hero before, and it was rather a thrilling experience. He is extraordinarily British - very quiet and drawly-voiced, and quite absolutely splendid. We are all quite in love with him, and buying postcards of him. I was sufficiently excited on Tuesday to indite a sonnet to the gallant explorer - not a bad sonnet either, as my sonnets go. Shall I angle for his signature ...? I might send him the sonnet, to save myself the trouble of writing a letter" (quoted in Field, The Imperial Detective: Empire and Englishness in the Detective Fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers and P.D. James, p.22). The sonnet was evidently sent, and here we have Shackleton's gracious reply. He opens by apologising for the delay in answering, an indication of the niceties of early twentieth-century epistolary conduct as it can only have been a few days since he received Sayers's note; "I have been very busy. I quite remember the schoolgirls. Thank you very much for the sonnet, only you are too kind to us in it". A record of a wonderfully evocative Edwardian convergence; the young author-to-be exemplifying attitudes of the time, when " 'extraordinarily British' was evidently a compliment of the highest order", and the Imperial hero responding entirely to type.
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