The Endurance Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

First Line:

The captain of the ship, Frank Worsley, would remember the day vividly ever afterward.

Description:

In August 1914, the renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven set sail for the South Atlantic in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize in the history of exploration: the first crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent. Weaving a treacherous path through the freezing Weddell Sea, they had come within eighty-five miles of their destination when their ship, Endurance, was trapped fast in the ice pack. Soon the ship was crushed like matchwood, leaving the crew stranded on the floes. Their ordeal would last for twenty months, and they would make two near-fatal attempts to escape by open boat before their final rescue. Alexander gives a riveting account of the expedition, and she presents the astonishing work of Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer hired to create a visual record of the adventure. The original glass plate negatives of these remarkable images were stored in hermetically scaled canisters that miraculously survived months on the ice floes, a week in an open boat on the polar seas, and several more months buried in the snows of a rocky outcrop called Elephant Island.

Selected Reviews:

"Ms. Alexander has sensibly, and ably, concentrated on the characters and interactions of the men, as revealed in diaries and letters, and used her text as a frame for previously unpublished pictures by the expedition's Australian photographer, Frank Hurley."

--Phoebe-Lou Adams, Atlantic Monthly