The Endurance - Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

Author: Caroline Alexander

NATIONAL BEST SELLER • A riveting account of Shackleton's famed Antarctic expedition, recounting one of the last great adventures in the Heroic Age of exploration—perhaps the greatest of them all—the shipwreck that stranded the crew for twenty months. Including never-before published photographs.

In August 1914, days before the outbreak of the First World War, the renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven set sail in their ship, Endurance, 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 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.