Shackleton's Endurance: How All 28 Men Survived

In 1914 Ernest Shackleton set out to make the first land crossing of Antarctica. He never set foot on the continent. His ship was trapped and crushed by sea ice, and his men spent almost two years stranded at the bottom of the world.

What followed is one of the great survival stories of the twentieth century: months on drifting ice, an open-boat voyage across the Southern Ocean, a crossing of an unmapped island, and a rescue that brought back every one of the 28 men. The ship itself was found on the sea floor in 2022.

The plan

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition aimed to cross Antarctica on foot, from the Weddell Sea, past the South Pole, to the Ross Sea on the other side. One ship, Endurance, would carry the crossing party to the Weddell Sea coast. A second party, sailing on the Aurora, would lay supply depots from the Ross Sea side for the last stretch of the march.

Endurance was a new ship, built at the Framnæs shipyard in Sandefjord, Norway, and launched in December 1912 as Polaris. Shackleton bought her and renamed her after his family motto. She left Plymouth on 8 August 1914, days after Britain entered the First World War.

Trapped in the ice

In early 1915, still short of the coast, Endurance was caught in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. She could not break free, and through the long Antarctic winter she drifted with the ice, carrying her crew further from land than any of them wanted to be.

The pressure of the moving ice slowly broke the ship. On 27 October 1915 she was crushed and abandoned, and on 21 November she sank. The men had already moved onto the ice with three lifeboats, sledges, dogs and whatever stores they could carry.

Life on the floe

The crew camped on the drifting ice, first at a site they called Ocean Camp and then at Patience Camp, waiting for the floe to carry them towards open water. For months they lived in tents on a slab of ice floating over deep ocean, hunting seals and penguins to stretch their supplies.

The expedition's photographer, Frank Hurley, had taken around 550 glass-plate photographs. He could carry only about 120, so he chose the best and destroyed the rest. Those plates are why we can still see the ship in the ice, as in the picture at the top of this page.

Elephant Island

On 9 April 1916, as the ice broke up, the men took to the three lifeboats. After days of rowing and sailing through freezing seas they reached Elephant Island, a barren, storm-beaten island off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, in mid-April. It was the first solid ground they had stood on in well over a year.

Nobody was going to find them there. The island was far from any shipping route, and no one knew where they were. Shackleton decided that the only chance was to go for help himself.

The voyage of the James Caird

On 24 April 1916 Shackleton and five men set out in the James Caird, a small open lifeboat, to reach South Georgia, where there were whaling stations. It was a voyage of about 800 miles across the Southern Ocean, among the roughest waters on Earth, in an open boat.

Their navigator, Frank Worsley, had to find a small island across that ocean, and his navigation was central to their success. After more than two weeks at sea they reached King Haakon Bay on South Georgia on 10 May. But they had landed on the wrong side of the island.

Across South Georgia

The whaling stations lay on the north coast, beyond a range of mountains and glaciers that no one had crossed. Leaving three exhausted men at the landing place, Shackleton, Worsley and Tom Crean set off on foot with almost no equipment.

They walked almost without rest and reached the whaling station at Stromness on 20 May 1916. The men who had stayed behind on South Georgia were picked up soon after. The 22 men on Elephant Island were still waiting.

The rescue

Getting back to Elephant Island proved harder than reaching South Georgia. Shackleton made several attempts in different ships, each blocked by pack ice. Finally, on 30 August 1916, aboard the Chilean tug Yelcho, he reached the island.

All 22 men there were alive. Together with the six from the James Caird, all 28 members of the Weddell Sea party survived. Not everyone in the wider expedition was so lucky: on the other side of Antarctica, three men of the Ross Sea party died before their own rescue in January 1917.

The ship found

For more than a century Endurance lay somewhere under the Weddell Sea. On 5 March 2022 the Endurance22 expedition found her, at a depth of about 3,008 metres. The cold, dark water had kept her in what was described as a brilliant state of preservation.

The wreck is protected as a historic site and monument under the Antarctic Treaty, so it will stay where it lies. Stories like this, with clear stages and a turning point at every step, are a gift to comics writers; our guide to storyboarding a story panel by panel shows how such a tale can be broken down.

True stories told in pictures have a long history, from newspaper strips to book-length works such as Maus, which we discuss in Maus and the graphic novel. For another escape against the odds, read the 1962 escape from Alcatraz.