Endurance summary

As summer approached, the sunlight was constant. But they were still more than 200 miles away from actual land. All around them, ice floes made navigation impossible, and the goal became simply to keep the ship from becoming encased in the encroaching ice. The larger bergs provided shelter from the near constant gales that built up and blew from all directions. 

As they picked their way from one patch of open water to another, they couldn’t help but be astonished by the life they encountered everywhere. Fin, humpback, and blue whales peeked through the ice floes. Orcas stalked the abundant life on the ice, where seals and penguins frolicked and lounged – and eyed the Endurance with open curiosity as it sailed past. Overhead, countless albatross, petrels, and terns squawked and dove and gobbled up the endless supply of fish below the ice.

By 1915, only a few Europeans had attempted to survive the endless darkness of a polar winter. Some had died during the infinite nights, long before they were ever found. Other expeditions had caused madness, with survivors despairing so deeply that they never recovered.

Despite this, members of the Endurance crew showed few signs of depression as Antarctic winter approached. If anything, it brought them closer. A motley crew by anyone’s standards, this diverse band of men had been carefully vetted by Shackleton, who had a sixth sense when it came to character. 

Life aboard ship had been relatively comfortable, but surviving in tents on exposed ice was another thing entirely. The dogs of the expedition hardly saw a difference, but the crew now split up into tents that were carefully organized on the ice. 

The first night, Shackleton didn’t even try to sleep. He paced the floe, listening to the pressure build and wondering how long the Endurance would be visible above the ice. Their home had become a broken shell. 

As November drew to a close, they’d been living on the ice for about a month. So far, they’d developed self-reliance and endurance beyond their wildest dreams. They’d long ago learned to survive, and their hunting skills were off the charts. All they could do was wait for the ice to split and take their tiny boats to the open sea. But wait as they might, the ice stayed solid.

By December 7, they realized they’d actually drifted backward a bit and had lost the progress they’d made walking. Later in the month, they decided to try and make westward progress on the ice again – so their sturdy campsite was struck, the sleds were loaded, and the men began lugging the small whalers in another slow pilgrimage. 

While the current had been blowing the crew toward land, it did them no good – they were trapped on the ice. All they could do was track their drift and decide where they might head when they found open water at last. In four months on this ice pack, they drifted past the safety of the Palmer Peninsula and headed dangerously close to the open ocean between South America and Antarctica, the dreaded Drake Passage. 

But that was far from the only worry. The ocean waves were breaking up the ice under them. By the morning of April 10, their camp was on a piece of ice that measured just 120 by 90 yards. At noon that day, an enormous crack opened up in the middle. The order came to strike the tents, and the boats were readied. Just 40 minutes later, Shackleton gave the order to launch the boats.

At 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon on May 20, 1916 the figures of three ragged men staggered into Stromness whaling station on South Georgia Island, sending up a cry from local boys and summoning the station foreman. He was puzzled, given this remote outpost never saw strangers and no ships had docked. As they came closer, he saw they were heavily bearded, threadbare and filthy, their faces blackened with soot from open fires. Signs of frostbite from nights spent in the mountainous cold of the island were clear, too. 

“Would you please take us to Anton Anderson?” one of the strangers asked.