Sir Ernest Shackleton, a member of the "Discovery-Expedition" of 1901, returned with the forty-year-old "Nimrod" back into the Antarctic in order to march to the South Pole but had to give up just 180 km before his goal. Shackleton had at first tried to purchase the whale catcher "Bjørn" built at the Risør shipyard in Lindstøl. Since he couldn't raise the wind, he conceded this ship to Wilhelm Filchner's second German Antarctic expedition. Filchner refurbished the ship at the Blohm & Voss dockyard and renamed it "Deutschland". There was enough room for thirty-four crewmembers, while single cabins were available for scientists and mates. In addition, a geologist, a meteorologist, an oceanographer and a zoologist shared a laboratory. The expedition, which visited the Southern Ocean between 1911 and 1912, made substantial contributions about the physical and chemical conditions in the western part of the southern Atlantic Ocean and the Weddell Sea. The Japanese first arrived in the Southern Ocean in 1911. Ensign Nobu Shirase explored with the "Kainan Maru" the eastern part of the Ross Ice Shelf. The years between 1910 until 1912 were characterized by the "great race" of Amundsen and Scott. While Scott travelled in the twenty-six-year-old "Terra Nova", which had escorted him out of the ice in 1903, Roald Amundsen borrowed the reliable "Fram" for his South Pole expedition. During the dramatic race, Australia unobtrusively sent its first expedition ship, the "Aurora", into the Antarctic under Douglas Mawson. An air-tractor, the first airplane in the region, was aboard but it proved to be useless. The failed attempt to cross Antarctica, for which Shackleton used the "Endurance" and Mawson's "Aurora", was one of the last Antarctic expeditions before the outbreak of the First World War.