For 10 months, Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton and his men had been trapped aboard the HMS Endurance – the ship was stuck in Antarctic ice. Then, on October 27, 1915, a wave of pressure lifted the ship’s stern and tore off its keel. Freezing water poured in. It was time to disembark and try surviving, or die aboard the sinking ship.
Click start to play today’s Spell It, where we recount the ‘brave’ explorer’s story of survival against all odds.
The 27 crew members had been preparing for this moment. They removed the last of their belongings and headed across the endless white landscape of the frozen continent.
The men, with their leader Shackleton, had set out on a mission to establish a base on Antarctica’s Weddell Sea coast. They were making good progress and were just a day away from their destination. But a sudden storm pushed their ship against the hard-packed ice and jammed them for 10 months, as the ice floe moved further and further away from their goal. One of the crew, Thomas Orde-Lees, is known to have said the ship was “frozen like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar”.
But the ship couldn't last in those harsh conditions. It finally succumbed to the pressure of the ice. Once the crew saw the frigid waters swallow up the Endurance completely, it was time to talk about next steps. While the initial plan was to march across the ice toward land, it turned out to be impossible – their progress was too slow and the weather unfavourable. On top of that, the ice floe they were on was slowly and steadily drifting further to the north. Shackleton decided to wait.
On April 7, 1916, the crew spotted the peaks of Clarence and Elephant Islands, and two days later, their ice floe split beneath them with a thunderous crack. It was time to launch their boats, and get back into the open ocean. The crew battled the freezing ocean and the biting wind, and six days later, finally clambered ashore on Elephant Island. Wracked with dysentery and seasickness, nearly half the party were hallucinating and on the edge of insanity, according to History.com. But they were finally on dry land.
After nine days of recuperation, Shackleton took five others in a lifeboat, to a whaling station on South Georgia, more than 1,200km away. The journey was arduous. Shackleton recorded in his journal: “The wind simply shrieked as it tore the tops off the waves. Down into valleys, up to tossing heights, straining until her seams opened, swung our little boat.”
They finally made it ashore, but discovered they had been pushed off course, and were on the opposite side of the island. Leaving behind the weaker members, Shackleton and two others set off to reach it by foot, climbing over mountains and sliding down glaciers. They walked paths no one had braved ever before. And 36 hours later, they finally staggered into the station.
Hope reigned supreme. Once the other three members of the lifeboat had been collected, all attention was focused on rescuing the 22 men on Elephant Island. This turned out to be the most difficult task for Shackleton. Two attempts failed, once because the ship ran out of fuel trying to get through the pack ice, and the second time, the ship came tantalisingly close to Elephant Island but was pushed back by gales and ice.
Finally, Shackleton was able to borrow a ship called Yelcho from Chile – on August 16, it appeared just off the coast, as the crew members on Elephant Island prepared to eat a lunch of boiled seal backbone. It had been 128 since Shackleton had left his men, promising he’d be back for them – and he kept that promise.
About 20 months after they set out for the Antarctic, the Endurance crew miraculously returned to England – each and every one of them accounted for. For years, Endurance’s location remained a mystery. But in 2022, an international team of marine archaeologists, explorers and scientists found the ship at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.
The shipwreck, in a cold, isolated part of the world, lay bare the immense difficulties Shackleton and his crew faced in those months. But with their bravery and perseverance, under Shackleton’s calm, steadfast leadership, the story remains a tale of survival, hope and grim determination against all odds.
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