Mackintosh returned to England in June 1909. On reporting to the P & O, he was informed that due to his impaired sight he was discharged. Without immediate prospects of employment, he agreed, early in 1910, to accompany Douglas Mawson (who had served as a geologist on the Nimrod expedition and was later to lead the Australasian Antarctic Expedition) on a trip to Hungary, to survey a potential goldfield which Shackleton was hoping would form the basis of a lucrative business venture. Despite a promising report from Mawson, nothing came of this. Mackintosh later launched his own treasure-hunting expedition to Cocos Island off the Panama Pacific coast, but again returned home empty-handed. In February 1912, Mackintosh married Gladys Campbell, and settled into an office job as assistant secretary to the Imperial Merchant Service Guild in Liverpool. The safe, routine work did not satisfy him: "I am still existing at this job, stuck in a dirty office," he wrote to a former Nimrod shipmate. "I always feel I never completed my first initiation—so would like to have one final wallow, for good or bad!" He was therefore delighted, early in 1914, to receive an invitation from Shackleton to join the latter's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which was to attempt the first transcontinental crossing of Antarctica. Ross Sea party Early difficulties Shackleton's expedition contained two separate components. The main party would establish a base in the Weddell Sea, from which a group of six led by Shackleton was to march across the continent, via the South Pole. A supporting Ross Sea party, based on the opposite side of the continent in McMurdo Sound, would lay supply depots across the Great Ice Barrier, to assist the transcontinental party on the final stage of its journey. Mackintosh was originally to have been a member of Shackleton's transcontinental party, but difficulties arose over the appointment of a commander for the Ross Sea party. Eric Marshall, the surgeon from the Nimrod expedition, turned the assignment down, as did John King Davis; Shackleton's efforts to obtain from the Admiralty a naval crew for this part of the enterprise were rejected. The post of Ross Sea party leader was finally offered to, and accepted by, Mackintosh. His ship would be the Aurora, lately used by Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition and presently lying in Australia. Shackleton considered the Ross Sea party's assignment routine, and saw no special difficulties in its