21, The Endurance sank.įor the next five months, the men drifted on the equivalent of a melting ice cube, 1000 miles from civilization. Supplies were salvaged, the dogs evacuated down a canvas chute. Shackleton ordered the Endurance abandoned. Hurley had rigged up his camera and got a picture of the ship in her death hroes." Creaking and groaning, it pressed against the Endurance and finally crushed her.įrank Worsley, the ship's captain, describes it in a melodramatic 1930s documentary: "Her poor hull was racked and twisted after the mast came crashing was really heartbreaking to see the brave little Endurance, that had been our home so long, being crushed before our eyes. For ten months, the men were convinced that everything would be all right in the spring, even though from beneath their feet, the ice signaled otherwise. There were scientific experiments to conduct, soccer games to play on the ice, dog teams to train. Shackleton's men were prepared for polar winter. Says Alexander, "Within one day's sail from their destination on the Antarctic continent, the ice closed in around them, the temperature plummeted and they were frozen in."Īt first, life wasn't so bad. From Hurley's amazing photographs and film footage, painstakingly restored by the British Film Institute, as well as from the diaries of the men, we know how badly things began to go wrong for the explorers, practically in sight of their intended landfall.
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