The Unwavering Light of the Endurance

The Jaws of the Ice

The goal, the grand ambition, had been to cross Antarctica on foot. It was, in Sir Ernest Shackleton’s own words, the "one great main object of Antarctic journeyings" left to men. His ship, the *Endurance*, a handsome Norwegian-built barquentine, carried the 28 souls who would claim that prize. They had departed the whaling station on South Georgia Island on December 5, 1914, plunging south into the Weddell Sea. For weeks, the ship shouldered its way through the pack ice, the men on deck watching the jigsaw of white and blue rearrange itself with every league they traveled south. By mid-January 1915, they were close, a day’s sail from the continent where the great walk would begin. But the Antarctic winter was closing in early, a premature and violent clenching of its fist. The ice, which had been a loose and navigable slurry, began to congeal. Leads of open water that had offered passage one hour were gone the next, sealed by thousands of tons of grinding pressure. On January 18, the ice did not just close; it seized the *Endurance* and held it fast. The ship was, as one crewman later wrote, “frozen, like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar.” At first, there was hope. They were explorers; patience was a tool of the trade. But as days bled into weeks, and weeks into the long, sunless months of the polar night, the ship drifted helplessly northward with the ice pack, a prisoner of the current. Shackleton, a veteran of these latitudes, understood what was happening. The original objective was dissolving. A new one was taking shape, unspoken but heavy in the cold air: survival. He maintained the ship’s routines, organized football games on the ice, and encouraged singalongs to the tune of Leonard Hussey's banjo, fighting the corrosive effects of idleness and despair. All the while, the ice kept up its assault. Its pressure made the ship’s timbers scream, a sound the men would never forget. On October 27, after nine months in the ice’s grip, the ship’s agony became mortal. Beams snapped, the deck buckled, and the sea began to pour into the hull. Shackleton stood on the buckled deck and gave the order he had long dreaded: “Abandon ship!” They decamped onto the ice, a small city of men and dogs and salvaged supplies on a floating raft of frozen seawater. A month later, on November 21, they gathered to watch the end. The stern of the *Endurance* rose high in the air before the ship slid beneath the ice with a final, quiet sigh. Shackleton turned to his men. “She’s going, boys,” he said, his voice low and steady. “It’s time to get off.” The last physical link to their world was gone. They were 28 men, alone on the ice, a thousand miles from civilization.