In the end they had to rescue themselves and this is the story of their indomitable courage and strength to survive under incredibly harsh conditions and in grave discomfort. Shackleton realised the only way out was on their own, so they abandoned the boat and made for the pack ice at first dragging the boats, then relying a floe to carry them north where they might find more supplies, or be rescued.
#Endurance book cracked
They settled in to a routine until the ice went against them and cracked the Endurance. Summer wore on and there was no escape - the winds were in the wrong direction - then winter hit and they were trapped in their boat. The Endurance had been built to push through the pack ice, but conditions proved too much and it was trapped in pack ice.
Amundsen had already reached the pole first but for Shackleton it was unfinished business. The bare-bones of the story are that Shackleton and his team left civillisation in 1914 in the Endurance to travel to attempt to reach the South Pole - a trip he had tried and failed by only a couple of hundred miles or so to achive in 1908. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but it is a good deal harder.
#Endurance book trial
But also it proves that you can know the end of a story - it is a well known fact that Shackleton brought all his men through this arduous trial and all survived - and it doesn't spoil the story at all. Published in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural History's landmark exhibition on Shackleton's journey, The Endurance thrillingly recounts one of the last great adventures in the Heroic Age of exploration-perhaps the greatest of them all.This book is one of the few exceptional -absolutely execptional- tales of survival and it proves the maxim that nothing is so bad that it can't get worse.
#Endurance book professional
Finally Hurley was forced to abandon his professional equipment he captured some of the most unforgettable images of the struggle with a pocket camera and three rolls of Kodak film. The survival of Hurley's remarkable images is scarcely less miraculous: The original glass plate negatives, from which most of the book's illustrations are superbly reproduced, were stored in hermetically sealed canisters that survived months on the ice floes, a week in an open boat on the polar seas, and several more months buried in the snows of a rocky outcrop called Elephant Island. Together, text and image re-create the terrible beauty of Antarctica, the awful destruction of the ship, and the crew's heroic daily struggle to stay alive, a miracle achieved largely through Shackleton's inspiring leadership. And she presents the astonishing work of Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer whose visual record of the adventure has never before been published comprehensively. Their ordeal would last for twenty months, and they would make two near-fatal attempts to escape by open boat before their final rescue.ĭrawing upon previously unavailable sources, Caroline Alexander gives us a riveting account of Shackleton's expedition-one of history's greatest epics of survival. Soon the ship was crushed like matchwood, leaving the crew stranded on the floes.
Weaving a treacherous path through the freezing Weddell Sea, they had come within eighty-five miles of their destination when their ship, Endurance, was trapped fast in the ice pack. In August 1914, days before the outbreak of the First World War, the renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven set sail for the South Atlantic in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize in the history of exploration: the first crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent.
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