What the expedition set out to do
The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 to 1917 was led by Ernest Shackleton. Its aim was to cross the Antarctic continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea by way of the South Pole, a distance of well over a thousand miles. Two ships were involved: Endurance, which was to land the crossing party on the Weddell Sea side, and Aurora, which was to work from the Ross Sea side and lay supply depots for the final stages. The Aurora party carried out its own difficult mission, but this article is concerned with the Endurance.
The expedition never made the crossing. Its fame rests on what happened after the ship was lost.
The ship
Endurance was a wooden barquentine with an auxiliary steam engine, built in Sandefjord, Norway, and originally named Polaris. She had been designed as a polar cruise ship and was very strongly built, with thick timbers and heavy internal framing. Shackleton bought her and renamed her after his family motto, which is generally given as “By endurance we conquer”.
She left Plymouth in August 1914, just as the First World War began, and reached Buenos Aires before continuing to South Georgia. Frank Worsley was her captain. The crew numbered 28, including scientists, a photographer, Frank Hurley, and many experienced seamen.
Trapped in the Weddell Sea
Endurance left South Georgia in December 1914 and soon met heavy pack ice. By January 1915 she was held fast, still far short of the planned landing place. Winter came and the ship drifted with the ice, slowly carried north-west.
As the months passed, pressure from the moving ice began to grind against the hull. The crew tried to free the ship with saws and picks without success. In the southern spring of 1915 the pressure became severe, the planking began to give way and water poured in despite the pumps. On 27 October 1915 Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship and the men camped on the ice. Endurance sank on 21 November 1915. Her loss is counted among the best-known of the famous shipwrecks, even though no one died in it.
Life on the floes
The party first camped on a floe and then moved to others, dragging three lifeboats with them. These were the James Caird, the Dudley Docker and the Stancomb Wills. Their food was supplemented with seal and penguin meat, and several sled dogs were killed when supplies ran short. The drifting ice carried them north, away from any hope of walking across.
In April 1916 the floe on which they camped began to break up. The men took to the three boats and, after several days in cold, wet and dangerous conditions among ice and heavy seas, reached Elephant Island on about 15 April 1916. It was the first time they had stood on solid ground in many months, but the island is remote and uninhabited, and no one knew they were there.
The voyage of the James Caird
Shackleton decided that the only hope was to seek help at the whaling stations on South Georgia, roughly 800 nautical miles away across some of the roughest ocean on the planet. The James Caird, a wooden lifeboat about 22 feet long, was modified by the carpenter Harry McNish, who raised the sides and added a deck of sorts using materials taken from the other boats and sledges.
Shackleton left Elephant Island with five men on 24 April 1916: Worsley, Tom Crean, McNish, Timothy McCarthy and John Vincent. They had very limited navigational fixes, since the sky was seldom clear enough for the sun sights Worsley needed with a marine sextant. He made a small number of sights in the whole voyage, yet the boat reached South Georgia on 10 May, after about 16 days.
They landed on the south coast, in King Haakon Bay, far from the whaling stations on the north side. Three men, Shackleton, Worsley and Crean, then crossed the mountainous interior of the island on foot, reaching the station at Stromness around 20 May. This overland trek was undertaken without maps of the interior.
Rescue
It took time to organise help. Several early attempts to reach Elephant Island by ship were blocked by ice or by weather. The fourth attempt, with the small Chilean steamer Yelcho under Captain Luis Pardo, reached the island on 30 August 1916, and all 22 men there were taken off. Counting the six who had made the boat journey, all 28 men of the Endurance party survived. The Ross Sea party, in contrast, lost three men during its work.
Finding the wreck
In March 2022, a search expedition named Endurance22 located the wreck in the Weddell Sea, on the seabed at a depth of about 3,000 metres. It was found upright and remarkably well preserved, with the ship’s name still visible on the stern. The site is protected under the Antarctic Treaty system, and the survey was carried out without disturbing it.
Why the story endures
Historians often point to the quality of leadership and the discipline of the crew, but they also note the role of luck and the ship’s strength, which let her hold out for months. The expedition was a failure in terms of its objective and a success in terms of survival. The boat journey in particular shows how much a small, open craft and a skilled navigator can accomplish, and it fits into the wider history of polar sea exploration.