Trapped in the Ice

In August 1914, as the First World War was beginning in Europe, a wooden ship called Endurance set sail from Britain for Antarctica.

On board was the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. His plan was bold: to make the first crossing of the entire Antarctic continent on foot, from one coast to the other, by way of the South Pole.

His crew numbered twenty-eight men: sailors, scientists, a carpenter, a cook, a photographer and a ship's cat called Mrs Chippy.

Caught in the ice

In January 1915, Endurance sailed into the Weddell Sea, a vast bay of the Southern Ocean. It was summer in the south, but the sea was crowded with pack ice, huge sheets of frozen seawater that move with the wind and currents.

They were within sight of the Antarctic coast when the ice closed around the ship. Endurance was frozen in, held fast as if set in concrete.

There was nothing to do but wait. Through the long, dark Antarctic winter, the ship drifted slowly with the ice, hundreds of miles away from where they wanted to go. Shackleton kept the men busy, with work, football matches on the ice, dog-sled races and evening entertainments.

The ship is crushed

As spring came, the pressure of the shifting ice grew. The ship groaned and creaked. Its timbers twisted and cracked. In October 1915, the ice began to crush Endurance, and the men had to abandon it, setting up camp on the frozen sea beside it.

In November, the ship sank beneath the ice.

They were now on floating ice, hundreds of miles from land, in the most hostile place on Earth. No one in the outside world knew where they were. There was no radio that could reach help.

Shackleton told the men that their goal was no longer to cross Antarctica. It was to get every single one of them home alive.

Months on the ice

For months they camped on the drifting ice, with three lifeboats salvaged from the ship. They lived in thin tents, in wet sleeping bags, on a diet that became mostly seal and penguin meat. Shackleton is said to have given his own mittens to one of his men. He watched the mood of the camp constantly, moving troublemakers into his own tent, so they could not spread despair.

In April 1916, the ice began to break up beneath them. They launched the three small boats into the freezing sea. For seven terrible days and nights they sailed and rowed through ice and storms, soaked and frostbitten, until they reached a bleak, rocky place called Elephant Island.

It was the first time they had stood on solid ground in 497 days.

The voyage of the James Caird

But nobody would ever look for them on Elephant Island. It was far from any shipping route.

So Shackleton made an extraordinary decision. He would take one of the lifeboats, the James Caird, just under seven metres long, and sail it with five companions across about 1,300 kilometres of the stormiest ocean in the world, to the island of South Georgia, where there was a whaling station.

The other twenty-two men would wait on Elephant Island, sheltering under the two remaining boats turned upside down.

The voyage took about two weeks. The waves were enormous. The men were constantly soaked and freezing, chipping ice from the boat so it would not sink under the weight. The navigator, Frank Worsley, could only take measurements of the sun a handful of times, when it appeared through the clouds. Yet he guided them to South Georgia.

Across the mountains

They landed on the wrong side of the island. The whaling station was on the other coast, and between them lay mountains and glaciers that nobody had ever crossed.

Leaving three exhausted men behind, Shackleton, Worsley and Tom Crean set off on foot with a rope, an axe and screws from the boat fixed into their boots for grip. They walked for about thirty-six hours without proper rest. At one point, they slid down a mountainside in the dark, sitting on a coiled rope.

On 20 May 1916, three ragged, bearded men walked into the whaling station at Stromness. At first, the station manager did not recognise Shackleton, whom he had met before.

The rescue

The men on the other side of South Georgia were picked up at once. But reaching Elephant Island was harder. Pack ice blocked the way again and again. Three rescue attempts failed.

On the fourth attempt, on 30 August 1916, the small Chilean tug Yelcho reached the island. The waiting men saw a boat coming through the waves, with Shackleton standing in it.

He called out to ask if all were well. They were. All twenty-two men on Elephant Island had survived, after more than four months there.

Every member of Endurance's crew had survived.

Afterwards

Shackleton's expedition had failed completely in its goal. It never came close to crossing Antarctica. But it became one of the most famous survival stories ever told, and Shackleton is still studied today as an example of leadership in a crisis.

Sadly, the expedition's other party, which had been laying supplies on the other side of the continent, lost three men. And many of the Endurance crew went straight from Antarctica to fight in the First World War.

In March 2022, an expedition found the wreck of Endurance three kilometres down on the floor of the Weddell Sea, remarkably well preserved, with her name still clearly visible on her stern.

Want to read more?

Shackleton's own book, South, published in 1919, is in the public domain and free to read. Alfred Lansing's Endurance is one of the most gripping true adventure stories ever written, and Caroline Alexander's book includes Frank Hurley's astonishing photographs from the expedition.