What do the diaries of Shackleton and Scott reveal?

Shackleton edited his diaries, but Scott didn't have that option – the difference proved to be significant

• Rebecca Hunt - The Guardian, Saturday 22 March 2014
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Shackleton, far left, at ‘Ocean Camp’, built with lumber salvaged from Endurance, 1915. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

I've kept a diary once in my life, when I was 15. At 16, having realised it was a bomb waiting to go off, I buried it in a dustbin. I haven't ever regretted it. I wonder if my aunt felt the same. In a move far more decisive than mine, she torched her diaries in a bonfire. The third diarist in my family is my great-grandfather, who fought in the first world war. The many letters he wrote to my great-grandmother aren't exactly a diary, yet they document his experiences in a similar way. They are now in the Imperial War Museum, a thick binder of pages written during the gore and filth of total war. He didn't do anything as extreme as my aunt or me – we edited our pasts into ash and landfill – but my great-grandfather's letters are still edited. The words are brave and considered rather than raw and desperate, since they were for his wife, who must have been sick with worry and had three young sons to care for. I'm sure he never imagined me, the granddaughter of one of those boys, reading his letters 100 years later.

I am equally sure Captain Scott never intended for anyone else to read his diaries, although I have done (for my new novel, Everland), as have countless other people, and there is a chance my great-grandfather did too. Ernest Shackleton, however, would not have been surprised: he edited his 1914-17 journal into the book, South!, which was published three years after he had returned from Antarctica. Scott's journal, in contrast, was retrieved from his pocket after he had been dead for eight months. The difference would prove to be important.
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