Caroline Alexander · 1998 · survival

Caroline Alexander's account of the greatest survival story of the Heroic Age of polar exploration. In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to make the first crossing of Antarctica, but his ship the Endurance was beset and then crushed by the ice of the Weddell Sea, casting twenty-eight men adrift on the floes. This route follows their two-year ordeal: the long drift in the pack, the loss of the ship, the boat journey to Elephant Island, the 800-mile open-boat voyage of the James Caird, and the desperate crossing of South Georgia that finally brought rescue, without the loss of a single life.

1. 1
   South Georgia

   Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition makes its last call at the whaling station of Grytviken on South Georgia, taking on stores and waiting out a bad ice year. On 5 December 1914 the Endurance, a Norwegian-built barquentine made for the pack, sails south into the Weddell Sea, where Shackleton means to land a party and cross the whole Antarctic continent on foot.

2. 2
   Beset in the pack ice

   Two days out the ship meets the pack far north of where it should be, and for six weeks she butts and threads her way south through the floes toward Vahsel Bay. Then, on 18 January 1915, a northerly gale jams the ice solid around her. Beset and unable to move in any direction, the Endurance is frozen fast in the pack, like an almond set in a bar of chocolate.

3. 3
   The Endurance is crushed

   For ten months the trapped ship drifts helplessly with the pack, north and west across the Weddell Sea through the long polar winter. Then the ice begins to close. The pressure tears off her rudder and crushes in her sides, and on 27 October Shackleton orders all hands onto the floe; on 21 November 1915 the broken hull slips beneath the ice and is gone, leaving twenty-eight men stranded on the drifting pack.

4. 4
   Patience Camp

   The men make their home on the ice, first at Ocean Camp and then at Patience Camp, hauling their three salvaged lifeboats with them and watching the floe carry them slowly north. For months they wait, living on seal and penguin and dwindling stores, as the ice beneath them cracks and shrinks, until the breaking floes finally force them to launch the boats.

5. 5
   Elephant Island

   After a brutal week in the open boats among the bergs and the currents, the party lands on Elephant Island, a bleak and uninhabited rock off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. It is the first solid ground any of them has stood on in 497 days, but it lies far from every shipping lane, and no rescue will ever think to look for them here.

6. 6
   King Haakon Bay

   Shackleton picks five men and the sturdiest boat, the James Caird, and sets out to fetch help across 800 miles of the stormiest seas on earth. For sixteen days they bail and steer through gale after gale and mountainous waves, navigating by a handful of snatched sextant sights, until they make a near-impossible landfall on the wild southern coast of South Georgia, the very island they had left almost two years before.

7. 7
   Stromness

   Cast ashore on the wrong side of the island, Shackleton, Worsley and Crean climb across South Georgia's uncharted glaciers and peaks in a single thirty-six-hour push, without a map and with a few screws driven into their boot soles for grip, and walk down at last into the whaling station at Stromness. Over the months that follow Shackleton goes back again and again for the men left behind, and brings every last one of them home alive.