![]() Shackleton and his small crew sailed over 800 miles (1,300 km) across the Southern Ocean to a group of whaling stations in South Georgia. Related: When did Antarctica become a continent? He left the remainder of his men in the care of his second-in-command Frank Wild, who upturned the two remaining lifeboats to use as shelter. He selected five crew members to join him and set sail in the 22.5-foot-long (6.9-meter-long) lifeboat called the "James Caird". ![]() Ten days later, Shackleton set off to find help. On April 9 1916, the Endurance Expedition crew left the ice floe in the lifeboats, reaching the uninhabited and remote Elephant Island on April 14. Shackleton’s second-in-command Frank Wild inspects the crushed remains of ‘Endurance’ after the crew abandoned ship (Image credit: Getty / Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge) Shackleton's rescue mission Shackleton led his men through the shrinking ice pack for months while they tried to reach land. The ship sank shortly afterwards and the crew escaped with three lifeboats and limited supplies. Stuck fast in the ice, with the crew unable to break Endurance free, the ship drifted to within approximately 30 miles (48km) of Antarctica in January 1915, before drifting north.Įndurance was slowly crushed by the moving ice, until Shackleton ordered the crew to abandon ship on Oct. With a crew of 28 (including Shackleton), Endurance entered the Weddell Sea but became trapped in pack ice during Dec. On the other side of the continent, the second crew, called the Ross Sea Party, planned to drop off depot supplies from their ship Aurora. "He hoped to cross Antarctica and make a famous name for himself over and above Scott." "His expedition would consist of two ships: one would drop supply depots for him and the other from the other side of the continent, which he would personally lead," British explorer and Shackleton biographer Sir Ranulph Fiennes told All About History magazine. The crew sailed to the Weddell Sea via South Georgia. Except for Shackleton, who died from a heart attack at the beginning of a subsequent Antarctic expedition, while on South Georgia Island, once again.Formally known as the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the Endurance Expedition to Antarctica began in August 1914. (Most of the crew would survive till the 1960’s, earlier deaths being primarily due to WW I and WW II. Most amazingly, no crew member died of the endless hardships met by the men, albeit Perce Blackborrow lost his toes to frostbite… While the text is not written in the highest literary style, but built from the expedition journals, the plain depiction of the two years spent on the ice is telling most vividly of one of the most astounding survival epics of all times. Shackleton left almost immediately to rescue the rest of the Endurance crew, but due to ice conditions, it took him four attempts on four different boats to reach Elephant Island on 30 August 1916 and evacuate the twentysome sailors, who had been running short on food, with only two days left of supplies. From there, they were able to rescue the other three sailors left on King Haakon Bay. Three crew members, Shackleton, Worsley and Crean, then undertook to cross the mountainous center of South Georgia with no map and no equipment, in another epic feat, and reached the whaling station in a 36 hour trek, on. They were in terrible conditions and could not afford to circle the island to reach the Norwegian whaling station. As there was no hope to be rescued by a passing whaler, Shackleton decided to sail back to South Georgia Island with five crew members and against all odds, battled the worst possible weather and sea conditions for 14 days to reach the Island on 5 May. (Incidentally, its remain were found at the bottom of the Weddel Sea last month!) For five months, the crew would camp on the ice, along the three lifeboats of the Endurance, drifting westwards until the ice pack broke and forced them to get on the boat on 8 April 1916, sailing in the heart of the Southern Winter with -30 temperatures and reaching the desolate Elephant Island on 14 April. The ice pack carried the immobilised ship until 25 October 1915, when the ice crushed the boat hull beyond repair and it sank a few days later. ![]() ![]() (The title in French is the Endurance Odyssey.) The above map describes the path of the crew once the boat became stuck, on 14 February, two months after it had left South Georgia on 5 December 1914. While I knew of the Endurance crew’s extraordinary story of resilience in the toughest imaginable conditions, I had not yet read Shackleton’s South, a depiction of the many challenges met by the expedition after the Endurance got stuck in the ice pack.
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