Despite the public acclaim that had greeted Ernest Shackleton's achievements after the Nimrod Expedition in 1907–1909, the explorer was unsettled, becoming—in the words of British skiing pioneer Sir Harry Brittain—"a bit of a floating gent".[2] By 1912, his future Antarctic plans depended on the results of Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition, which had left Cardiff in July 1910, and on the concurrent Norwegian expedition led by Roald Amundsen. The news of Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole reached Shackleton on 11 March 1912, to which he responded: "The discovery of the South Pole will not be the end of Antarctic exploration".[3] The next work, he said, would be "a transcontinental journey from sea to sea, crossing the pole".[4] He was aware that others were in the field pursuing this objective.