Shackleton and the Endurance: A Rescue Against All Odds
1916 · event
In January 1915 the ship Endurance, carrying Ernest Shackleton and twenty seven men on an attempt to cross Antarctica on foot, became trapped in the ice of the Weddell Sea. They drifted with the floe for ten months. In November the pressure of the ice crushed the hull and the ship sank, leaving the party camped on a moving surface of frozen sea with three small boats, some dogs and what they could carry. The expedition's purpose changed in an instant from exploration to survival.
For five more months they lived on the ice as it broke up beneath them, then took to the boats and reached Elephant Island in April 1916, the first solid ground under their feet in sixteen months. It was uninhabited and far from any shipping route. Shackleton chose five companions and set out in the seven metre boat James Caird for the whaling stations of South Georgia, thirteen hundred kilometres across the roughest ocean in the world.
They navigated by occasional sun sights and made landfall after sixteen days, on the wrong side of the island. Shackleton, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean then crossed the unmapped mountains and glaciers of South Georgia on foot in thirty six hours and walked into the station at Stromness.
Three attempts to return for the men on Elephant Island were turned back by ice. On 30 August 1916 the Chilean steam tug Yelcho, commanded by Luis Pardo, reached the beach and took off every one of them. All twenty eight members of the expedition survived. The story is taught as a model of leadership under pressure, and in 2022 the wreck of the Endurance was found upright and remarkably intact three thousand metres beneath the Weddell Sea.