the 'Nimrod'

Nimrod was the ship used by Ernest Shackleton in his 1908 Antarctic Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole. It was a schooner completed in 1867 of 334 grt which had been used to hunt seals and whales. Shackleton had it re-rigged as a barquentine. There was an auxiliary steam engine, which enabled a speed of 6 knots (11 km/h) under power. But the ship was so overloaded with supplies for the expedition that it could not carry enough coal to make passage to the Antarctic from New Zealand, and Shackleton had to arrange for the ship to be towed to the edge of the pack ice by the tramp steamer Koonya. The NZ government paid half the cost of the tow; and James Mills, Chairman of the Union Steam Ship Company, paid the other half.

Nimrod was initially captained by Rupert England, but Shackleton was dissatisfied with him and replaced him with Frederick Pryce Evans, who commanded the ship on the relief voyage in 1909.

The expedition's southern march reached a farthest south latitude of 88° 23' S, just 97.5 nautical miles (180.6 km or 112.2 miles) from the pole.

Nimrod was sold on Shackleton's return to Britain. The ship's fate, 10 years after its return from the Antarctic, was being battered to pieces in the North Sea, after running aground on the Barber Sands off England's Norfolk coast on 31 January 1919; only two of her 12-person crew survived.

A number of geographic features of Antarctica were named after this ship, including Nimrod Glacier. (condensed from wikipedia)