Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance

Time stranded: 15 months

Distance traveled: <5,000 miles

Terrain types: Sea, ice sheet

Deaths: 0

Situation ended: Sent out a party to find help

 Location: Antarctica

In 1914 Ernest Shackleton launched an expedition to Antarctica aboard a ship called the “Endurance”. The vessel was made specifically to travel through Arctic conditions and waters, with a thick rounded hull for smashing through ice.

The ship sailed for Buenos Aires in Argentina and due to the rounded shape of the hull took almost 2 months to reach its location. Here the ship made its final preparations for its trip south and its crew awaited their leader Ernest Shackleton who was travelling separately from England.

On October 26th, 1914 Shackleton and his crew set sail for their first point of call in the Arctic which was a whaling station at Grytviken on the island of south Georgia. The ship arrived on the 5th of November and stayed there for 1 month, leaving for the south Weddelling Sea on the 5th of December.

Only 2 days after leaving the whaling station the ship encountered polar pack ice, clumps of small icebergs drifting together in a broken sheet. Due to the ship’s design and steam-powered engines Endurance managed to push through the ice at a steady 30 miles a day.

This slow progress went on for some time and got so bad that at one point the ship had to hide behind a large iceberg to avoid a blizzard. The ship wasn’t able to push through as the pack ice had clumped up too much and became too heavy to ram through, and the blizzard caused the ship to spend 5 days moving back and forth behind the iceberg as it drifted with the tide.

After the blizzard stopped the ship started to make slow progress again, but only a few hours later ran into another drift of pack ice. The decision was made to try and push through and the ship set its engines to low and headed right in, which is when things started to really go wrong.

The ship quickly became stuck and another gale set it, hardening the ice around the ship and seeing it stuck solid. For the next 6 days, the gale continued to blow and further harden the ice around them, it was at this point they knew they would never reach their next point of call, Vahsel Bay which was only 200 miles away, so they decided to make an escape plan.

However, there was nothing they could do while trapped on the ship in the ice pack and for several months drifted along with the giant ice sheet until on the 27th of October 1915 things got even worse. The ice surrounding the hull had become so heavy and swollen that it cracked and started to flood the internal areas of the ship.

Maintenance was done as best as the crew could, but further cracks and flooding made for a very desperate situation. If the hull outside the engine room became flooded then the generator would go down, which means the heat would fail and these early solid metal ships become giant freezers.

On the 21st of November 1915, the ship had to be abandoned. The engine room had shut down and flooding had taken the entire bottom and middle of the ship, so the crew salvaged what they could and made a makeshift camp on the ice.

They survived like this for the next few weeks until the ice pack broke up enough for the crew to take the 3 lifeboats from the endurance and try to sail to the south Shetland islands. 22 of the crew stayed behind on the ice while the rescue boats tried to make it to the islands which they did quite quickly, but from here it was an 800-mile trip back to the south Georgia island where they could find a ship to help.

The trip to the whaling station took 2 weeks, but since the whaling vessels weren’t fitted to sail through such cold conditions and thick ice they weren’t suitable to mount a rescue party. They tried to make it to the survivors on 3 separate attempts before the ice shifted enough for them to get through, and the 22 men survived for over 2 months since the lifeboats first left before they were finally safe.