This is a October 19, 2015 file photo of former Army officer Henry Worsley, right, with Britain's Prince William as they hold the British flag in London. (AP Photo)
The message, transmitted on Friday via satellite telephone from freezing isolation in Antarctica, sounded resigned, melancholy and indisputably weary, as the speaker recalled the end of a previous explorer's attempt to traverse the most inhospitable terrain on earth and now found himself in his predecessor's snow boots.
"When my hero, Ernest Shackleton, stood 97 miles from the South Pole on the morning of January 9, 1909, he said he'd shot his bolt," the British adventurer Henry Worsley said in the message. "Well, today, I have to inform you, with some sadness, I, too, have shot my bolt."
"My journey is at an end," Worsley said. "I have run out of time, physical endurance and a simple inability to slide one ski in front of the other to travel the distance required to reach my goal."
Worsley's disappointment was acute, his sense of failure more intense because of how close he had come to success. Attempting to be the first person to cross Antarctica on foot, unassisted and unsupported, he crossed more than 900 miles and was forced, by exhaustion and ill health, to call for help 30 miles from his journey's intended end.
But his story grew far worse than disappointing; rescued and flown to a hospital in Punta Arenas, in the Patagonia region of southern Chile, he was given a diagnosis of peritonitis, and he died on Sunday. He was 55.
The death was reported on the website of the Royal Foundation, the philanthropic agency of the duke and duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry. Worsley, a career soldier before he retired from the British military in October, was making his trek to raise money for the Endeavour Fund, a Royal Foundation project that supports the recovery of wounded and sick servicemen and women.
"We have lost a friend, but he will remain an inspiration to us all," Prince William, duke of Cambridge, said in a statement.
Worsley's fascination with Antarctica - and Shackleton - was lifelong. He was a descendant of Frank Worsley, whose seamanship, during Shackleton's approach to Antarctica as 1914 turned to 1915, saved the crew after the ship became trapped in sea ice.
Henry Worsley himself had made two previous journeys on the continent. The first, in 2008 and 2009, was in commemoration of Shackleton's journey a century earlier; Worsley retraced the original route through the Transantarctica range and across the Beardmore Glacier. The party arrived at Shackleton's furthest point south - 97 miles from the Pole, where he "shot his bolt" - exactly 100 years to the day after Shackleton himself did, and then proceeded to finish what Shackleton did not.
Worsley's second trip, leading a team of six in 2011, celebrated the centennial of the journeys led by Robert Scott Falcon and Roald Amundsen, who reached the pole within five weeks of each other; Worsley, traveling with others, followed the Amundsen route from the Bay of Whales across the Ross Ice Shelf.
An undertaking requiring enormous physical strength and stamina, Worsley's final journey was "a feat of endurance never before achieved," as he described it.
(A Norwegian explorer, Borge Ousland, crossed Antarctica alone and unsupported in 1996-97, but he used a kite to pull his sled. In 2012,
a British woman, Felicity Aston, skied alone across Antarctica, but she had two supply drops.)
Worsley began his trek in November on Berkner Island, which is surrounded by an ice shelf. Braving temperatures of 40 degrees below zero and attenuated air at elevations above 9,000 feet, and buffeted by sometimes brutal winds, Worsley wore mountaineering skis and hauled a supply sledge with gear - including a tent, electronic communications equipment, climbing apparatuses for ascents and enough food for 80 days - that weighed over 300 pounds. He walked, on a normal day for 13 hours.
On Jan. 3, Day 51, he reached the South Pole and was greeted by staff members of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, the first humans he had seen since his departure. He had to resist taking any food or supplies from them, he said, to maintain the integrity of his unsupported and unassisted journey.
He made daily entries in an audio journal, recording his thoughts in his tent at night, not only describing his mood and the rugged elements of the day just past but also recounting critical episodes in Shackleton's calamitous journey of 100 years ago, ruminating on Tennyson and Joyce and fantasizing about junk food. He often sounded upbeat, even about alarming details like cold - on Day 55, Jan. 6, he reported a temperature recording of minus 44 Celsius (about minus 47 Fahrenheit), but his message was cheery:
"My climb continues up the Titan Dome, another 200 feet to 9,700 today," he said. "Similar to yesterday, the surface has remained very even and generally calm, and the weather has been glorious."
As the days passed, his tone revealed his waning strength, and the messages turned occasionally dire.
"In sum, it's been a punishing day," he said on Jan. 17, Day 66. "The cruelty," he said, "is the very soft snow. Hellish. All day. I'm weaker now, and it's the last thing I needed. It saps what little energy I have left."
Alastair Edward Henry Worsley was born in London on Oct. 4, 1960, to Gen. Sir Richard Worsley, a distinguished British army officer, and the former Sarah Anne Mitchell, known as Sally. An athlete in school, he excelled at cricket.
His military career began in the late 1970s; he served in an infantry regiment known as the Green Jackets and, later, the Rifles. In addition to service in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, in 2001 he was commander of Britain's military intervention in Afghanistan, known as Op Veritas.
Worsley married Joanna Stainton in 1993. She survives him, as do their two children, Max and Alicia, and a sister, Charlotte.
Worsley exceeded his journey's fundraising goal of 100,000 pounds (about $142,000), the Endeavour Fund said on its website. When he was airlifted from Antarctica on Saturday, it was initially thought that his chief problems were exhaustion and dehydration. In Punta Arenas, however, doctors found that he had peritonitis, a dangerous infection of the lining of an abdominal wall that is usually caused by some kind of rupture or perforation. Emergency surgery failed to save him.
"My summit is just out of reach," Worsley had said during a sorrowful and somewhat rambling final recorded message from Antarctica. He estimated he had about six hours to wait before his rescue plane arrived.
"The first thing I'll do is have a hot cup of tea," he said. "Perhaps a cake."
© 2016, The New York Times News Service