Most certainly, as exploration adventure survival stories go, Shackleton's 'South' has to be in the premier league. My copy in the Penquin Classics series, (which contains those excellent black and white photographs of Frank Hurley's), originally published from Shackleton's memoirs/logs from the Endurance expedition in 1919.
If ever a ship was more aptly named! Of course, this epic tale has been re-told in other books and on film. Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition was to be a Trans-Antarctic first, to cross the great continent from the Weddell Sea to the pole and then on to Scott's old base at Cape Evans on the Ross Sea coast. However the Antarctic pack ice had other ideas. The Endurance was crushed to death in 1915, forcing the marooned explorers to float on ice floes and eventually sail their three 'life boats' to the uninhabited terra firma of Elephant Island. To extricate his men, and facilitate their rescue Shackleton and five others then sail in one tiny boat across the South Atlantic Ocean to South Georgia Island. Only for the great man and two others to be forced to traverse across mountainous terrain in order to reach the whaling station at Stromness. Rescue was facilitated without a single loss of his party, except for Blackborrow's five frostbitten toes. (I have read that this man was a stowaway when Endurance left South America, but Shackleton makes no mention of this.)
What is not often recounted in this epic is the depot laying expedition of the Cape Evans party (who lost three men) in similar heroic circumstances to Scott's march, and avoided the same fate by the narrowest of margins. Also the account of the Ross Sea expedition ship Aurora, that battled with the pack ice and could easily have ended up with it's demise just like the Endurance. I was amazed to read of the Aurora's problems with it's 1915 telegraphic equipment, being unable to transmit at sufficient power due to ice on it's aerial insulation. Sixty years later I had the same problems on a ship in the arctic!
Also included in this splendid edition are the Appendices. Scientific Work by J.M.Wordie; Meteorology by L.D.A. Hussey; Physics by R.W.James; South Atlantic Whales and Whaling by Robert S.Clark, he writes "The vigorous slaughter of whales both in the sub-Antarctic and in the sub-tropics, for the one area reacts on the other, calls for universal legislation to protect the whales from early commercial extinction." This man's voice was almost fifty years before the birth of environmentalism in the 1960's.