The Ice Ship's Impossible Journey

When their ship, the Endurance, was crushed by Antarctic ice, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew began an unimaginable ordeal. This is the story of their 800-mile open-boat journey and treacherous mountain crossing, a legendary testament to human endurance and the will to survive against all odds. Discover the depths of grit required to lead a team through two years of frozen hell and bring every single man home alive.

The Death of the Sun

It was a sound before it was a sight. A groaning that seemed to come from the ice itself, a deep, structural complaint against the pressure that held the *Endurance* fast. For ten months, the ship had been a captive of the Weddell Sea, a black hull locked in a world of fractured white. Sir Ernest Shackleton and his 27 men had drifted with the pack, a slow, inexorable journey north. But on October 27, 1915, the ice began to win. The ship’s timbers, thick as a man’s chest, screamed. Perce Blackborow, the young stowaway who had become a steward, would later say the ship "literally jumped into the air and settled on its beam." Shackleton, a man whose optimism was a force of nature, stood on the tortured deck and saw the inevitable. The keel was ripped away, the sternpost shattered. Water, black and frigid, poured into the hull. He gave the order, his voice steady against the cacophony of his dying ship: "Abandon ship!" They moved onto the ice, a surface that was itself in motion, heaving and cracking around them. They established Ocean Camp, a collection of tents pitched a mile and a half from the broken vessel. For weeks, they watched the death throes. The ice, like a slow predator, squeezed the life from the *Endurance*. Finally, on November 21st, with a shout from Shackleton—"She's going, boys!"—the stern rose high in the air, and the ship that had carried all their hopes slid beneath the ice. They were alone, 28 men on a floating raft of frozen sea, with three small lifeboats salvaged from the wreck, hundreds of miles from the nearest hint of solid ground.

The Death of the Sun

A March for Three Ghosts

On May 10th, battered and broken, they made landfall on the southern coast of South Georgia—the wrong side. The whaling stations were on the north side, across an unmapped, impassable spine of mountains and glaciers. Two of the men were too weak to go on. For Shackleton, there was no choice. He, Worsley, and Crean would have to make the first-ever crossing of the island on foot. They set off with 50 feet of rope, a carpenter's adze, and screws from the boat hammered into their boots for grip. They carried a cooker and enough fuel for six hot meals. They abandoned their sleeping bags, knowing that to stop, to sleep, would be to freeze to death. For 36 hours, they walked, climbed, and slid. In the fog, they climbed a peak only to find a sheer drop on the other side. With darkness closing in, their only way down was to coil their rope and slide together, a human toboggan, down a steep, icy slope, falling a thousand feet in minutes. They were bone-weary, hallucinating from exhaustion. Shackleton would later write that during that march, it often seemed to him they were a party of four, not three. Worsley and Crean, independently, confessed to the same strange feeling of a fourth, guiding presence. At one point, Shackleton let his two companions sleep for five minutes, then woke them, telling them they had rested for half an hour. He knew any longer and they would never wake up. Then, at dawn, they heard it. A faint sound on the wind. A steam whistle from the Stromness whaling station. They stumbled down a final frozen waterfall—what is now called Shackleton Falls—and into the valley. That afternoon, two small boys playing near the station saw three figures walking toward them—men with blackened faces, matted hair, and clothes in tatters. The boys turned and fled. They were not men; they were ghosts who had walked out of the ice. The station manager, Thoralf Sørlle, whom Shackleton had met over a year before, did not recognize him. When Shackleton finally identified himself, the hardened whaler turned away and wept. Shackleton’s first thoughts were of his men. A boat was sent to pick up the three on the other side of the island. Then, he began the work of rescuing the 22 on Elephant Island. It would take three failed attempts, each one blocked by impenetrable sea ice, before he finally, on August 30, 1916, aboard a Chilean tugboat named *Yelcho*, broke through. As the small boat approached the shore, he counted the figures standing there. One, two, three… all 22. Not a single man lost. Every single one had come home.

The Ice Ship's Impossible Journey

The Death of the Sun

The Ice Ship's Impossible Journey

The Death of the Sun

Cape Wild

The Furious Fifties

A March for Three Ghosts