Lines of History From Druids to the Antarctic: The Druidical Temples in the County of Wilts - Edward Duke (1846) [Ernest Shackleton provenance & signed by author]

At least two layers of significant provenance on an already fascinating book of history drawing from Britain's misty Druidical past:

Inscribed by Edward Duke [Author] & later owned by Sir Ernest H. Shackleton

Edward DUKE. The Druidical Temples in the County of Wilts. London: John Russell Smith, MDCCCXLVI [1846]. 

(190 x 110 mm) p. viii, 203, [2], 28 + three foldouts. Interior near fine, showing charming evidence of the pages having been cut. Some slight separation between  some gatherings. Yellow fly leaves and pastedown. Bookplate of Ernest Shackleton on front pastedown with his initials handwritten behind the bookplate. Bound in brown cloth with ornamental stamping. Gilt title on side with 5 s price. Some bubbling to cloth but not significant. Overall VERY GOOD.

The second fly leaf contains an inscription from Reverend Edward Duke: To Johnathan Rashleigh, Esq. with the Author's Kind Regards, March 24, 1846

As he was trapped on the Endurance, frozen in ice off the coast of Antartica in 1915, Ernest Shackleton read. To keep his sanity, and help the crew keep theirs, he read the limited library of encyclopaedias, literature, plays, and travel narratives that he had brought on this ill-fated expedition.

This was not the first time that Shackleton relied on reading. As a child he was not particularly driven to do well in school, finding it boring. However, he read. He read and kindled a passion for exploration.

The Druidical Temples of Wilts County comes from Shackleton’s personal library and bears his initials and his bookplate. The bookplate features a pair of compasses, a square and other measuring instruments; the two pillars of Jachin and Boas which were to have graced the entrance to the temple of Solomon; stairs with the seven steps of wisdom; a hexagram containing the all-seeing eye— a tribute to his status as a Freemason more than as an explorer. On July 9^th, 1901, Shackleton was initiated into the Navy Lodge No. 2612 in London, and progressed through Third Degree which he was granted in 1913 and became an honorary member of the Lodge in 1914.

The book is the complicated synthesis of the 19^th century’s attempt to revisit a pre-Christian past through the lens of Christianity and science, with the aid of the heavily biased archeology of the time. Reverend Edward Duke (1779-1852) remarks on the origins of Druidism, archeological sites in Wiltshire, paying significant attention to Avebury and Stonehenge. In the same year that this book was published, and that Duke inscribed it to the Cornish noble, Jonathan Rashleigh, Esq., Duke also proposed that ancient sacred sites may have been constructed with significant alignment-- an idea that would later be known as ley lines. 

Perhaps it was within these pages that Shackleton sought to reveal further mysteries connecting the Druids and the Freemasons. Perhaps it was a simple curiosity about Britain’s past.