The Endurance

In August 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven set sail aboard the Endurance bound for the South Atlantic. Their goal was to be the first men to cross Antarctica, the last unclaimed prize in the history of exploration. Weaving a treacherous path through the icy Weddell sea, they had come within 80 miles of their destination when the ship was trapped fast in the pack. For the next ten months, they waited for the ice to break, but the break never happened and instead the Endurance was crushed like matchwood under the grinding floes, leaving the crew stranded. Caroline Alexander tells the gripping story of Shackleton's expedition and presents for the first time the astonishing visual record of Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer who had joined the crew of Endurance to document their expected achievement. Together, text and image recreate the terrible beauty of Antarctica, the awful destruction of the ship and the crew's daily struggle to stay alive. The ordeal included two terrifying, near-suicidal attempts to escape by open boat, before the final rescue after almost two years. The survival of Hurley's images is itself almost as miraculous as that of the crew- the glass-plate negatives were stored in hermetically sealed cannisters that lasted five months on the ice floes, a week in an open boat on the polar seas, and five months buried in the snows of a rocky outcrop called Elephant Island. Toward the end of the ordeal, Hurley was forced to abandon his professional equipment and captured some of the most astonishing moments with a pocket camera and a single roll of Kodak film. In Endurance, Caroline Alexander gives us two unforgetttable stories of human triumph under the most harrowing conditions- the creation and survival of Hurely's art - an unparalleled achievement in the history of photography; and the survival of the crew, a miracle made possible mainly through the inspiring leadership of Sir Ernest Shackleton.