Shackleton and the Endurance

In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton set out on what he called the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The goal was breathtaking in its ambition: to make the first-ever crossing of Antarctica on foot, from one side of the frozen continent to the other. His ship was named, with what would turn out to be terrible irony, the Endurance. The crew numbered twenty-eight men.

The Endurance left in August 1914, just as the First World War was breaking out in Europe. Shackleton offered his ship and crew to the war effort, but he was told to sail on. So they did — south, towards the bottom of the world, carrying with them sledges, dogs and supplies for a journey across the ice that no one had ever attempted.

But the expedition went wrong before it had truly begun. The men never even reached the continent they had come to cross. In early 1915, while still at sea, the Endurance became trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. Frozen solid into the floes, the ship could go neither forward nor back. And so, helplessly, it began to drift — locked in the ice, carried wherever the ice chose to go, for month after month.

For months the ice held the Endurance in its grip, and slowly that grip tightened. In October 1915 the pressure of the pack ice finally became too much: the floes squeezed the wooden hull until it began to splinter and break. Shackleton gave the order no captain wants to give. He told his men to abandon ship. In November 1915 the Endurance was crushed, and sank beneath the ice. The plan to cross Antarctica was over before it had begun.

Now twenty-eight men were stranded on a drifting sheet of ice, in one of the most hostile places on Earth, with no ship, no radio that could reach the world, and no hope of rescue. For months they survived in makeshift camps on the ice itself, eating seal and penguin, waiting for the floes to carry them somewhere — anywhere — they might escape. When the ice finally broke up beneath them, they launched the three small lifeboats they had saved from the ship.

In April 1916, after a perilous voyage through freezing, broken seas, all twenty-eight men reached land: Elephant Island, a bleak, uninhabited rock far from any shipping route. They were, at last, standing on solid ground — but it was a place no rescuer would ever think to look, and no one in the world knew they were alive.

Shackleton knew a hard truth: no one was coming to Elephant Island, because no one knew it held survivors. If the men were to live, someone would have to go and fetch help. So he made one of the boldest decisions in the history of exploration. He took five men and the largest of the lifeboats — the James Caird, an open wooden boat barely twenty-two feet long — and set out to sail some 800 miles across the most violent stretch of ocean on the planet to the island of South Georgia, where there was a whaling station, and people.

For more than two weeks the six men endured an ordeal almost beyond belief: mountainous waves, freezing spray, the constant threat of capsizing, navigating by a few brief glimpses of the sun. Against all odds, they reached South Georgia. But they had landed on the wrong, uninhabited side of the island. So Shackleton and two of the men did something no one had ever done: they crossed South Georgia's icy mountains on foot, without proper equipment, and walked into the whaling station to raise the alarm.

Even then, the rescue was not over. The sea ice kept driving Shackleton's relief ships back, and several attempts failed. But he refused to give up on the men he had left behind. Finally, in August 1916, he broke through and rescued every single one of them from Elephant Island. After nearly two years, an expedition that had failed at its every stated goal could claim the most astonishing success of all: not one member of the crew had died. It is remembered today as one of history's greatest feats of survival and leadership.