![]() ![]() Frank Wild, Shackleton’s second-in-command, wrote that “at least half the party were insane.” Yet they rowed resolutely toward their goal, and on April 15, they clambered ashore on Elephant Island. And while some were crippled by seasickness, others were wracked with dysentery. Worsley had by that stage not slept for 80 hours. Through it all, Captain Worsley navigated through the spray and the squalls, until after six days at sea, Clarence and Elephant Islands appeared just 30 miles ahead. It threw freezing spray in their faces and tossed frigid water over them, and it batted the boats from side to side and brought brave men to the fetal position as they battled the elements and seasickness. Now they had a new foe to contend with: the open ocean. Shackleton gave the order to break camp and launch the boats, and all at once, they were finally free of the ice that had alternately bedeviled and supported them. On April 9, it did just that, splitting beneath them with an almighty crack. “The floe has been a good friend to us,” wrote Shackleton in his diary, “but it is reaching the end of its journey, and is liable at any time now to break up.” “There was no alternative,” wrote Shackleton, “but to camp once more on the floe and to possess our souls with what patience we could till conditions should appear more favorable for a renewal of the attempt to escape.” Slowly and steadily, the ice drifted farther to the north and, on April 7, 1916, the snow-capped peaks of Clarence and Elephant Islands came into view, flooding them with hope. ![]() The initial plan was to march across the ice toward land, but that was abandoned after the men managed just seven and a half miles in seven days. Some of the younger dogs, too small to pull their weight, were shot, as was, to the chagrin of many, the unfortunate Mrs. ![]() In the time that passed between abandoning Endurance and watching the ice swallow it up completely, the crew salvaged as many provisions as they could, while sacrificing anything and everything that added weight or would consume valuable resources- including bibles, books, clothing, tools and keepsakes. Strenuous endeavors are made to free the Endurance from the ice, February 1915. In private, however, he revealed greater foreboding, quietly expressing to the ship’s captain, Frank Worsley, one winter’s night that, “The ship can’t live in this, Skipper … It may be a few months, and it may be only a question of weeks or even days … but what the ice gets, the ice keeps.” Survival on an Ice Floe Shackleton wrote Alexander Macklin, one of the ship’s surgeons, “did not rage at all, or show outwardly the slightest sign of disappointment he told us simply and calmly that we must winter in the Pack explained its dangers and possibilities never lost his optimism and prepared for winter.” There was nothing else to do but to establish a routine and wait out the winter. They had been within a day’s sailing of their landing place now the drift of the ice was slowly pushing them farther away with each passing day. Endurance was beset-in the words of one of the crew, Thomas Orde-Lees, “frozen like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar.” Suddenly, there was no way forward, nor any way back. For several weeks, the ship poked and prodded its way through leads in the ice, gingerly making its way south but on January 18, a northerly gale pressed the pack hard against the land and pushed the floes tight against each other. Two days after leaving South Georgia, Endurance entered the pack ice-the barrier of thick sea ice that stands guard around the Antarctic continent. The goal of expedition leader Shackleton, who had twice fallen short-once agonizingly so-of reaching the South Pole, was to establish a base on Antarctica’s Weddell Sea coast.įrom there a small party, including himself, would set out on the first crossing of the continent, ultimately arriving at the Ross Sea, south of New Zealand, where another group would be waiting for them, having laid depots of food and fuel along the way. Officers and crew of the Endurance pose under the bow of the ship at Weddell Sea Base during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-17, led by Ernest Shackleton.Įndurance had left South Georgia for Antarctica on December 5, 1914, carrying 27 men (plus one stowaway, who became the ship’s steward), 69 dogs, and a tomcat erroneously dubbed Mrs.
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