• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Although scientists and sailors had been prepared to travel south together, they had not counted on sharing one another's company for a polar winter. And while the possibility of the ship's wintering over had been discussed in Buenos Aires, the original plan had called for her to return to safe haven after depositing the shore party and their supplies.

“The idea of spending the winter in an ice bound ship is extremely unpleasant,” Hurley wrote in early February, “more so, owing to the necessarily cramping of the work and the forced association with the ships party—who, although being an amiable crowd are not altogether partial to the scientific staff.”

False hopes arose several times with the appearance of a lane, or a change in the ice, and more than once the men set out to cut or shake the ship free. On February 22, the drift of the Endurance carried her to the 77th parallel. It would be the farthest south attained by the Imperial Trans-Antarc-tic Expedition.

Cutting the ice around Endurance

On February 14 and 15, 1915, a lead of free water appeared 400 yards ahead of the stricken ship, and the crew made strenuous efforts to cut a path to this tantalizing lane.

Trying to break up ice from around Endurance

“The summer had gone,” Shackleton wrote. “Indeed the summer had scarcely been with us at all. … [T]he seals were disappearing and the birds were leaving us. The land showed still in fair weather on the distant horizon, but it was beyond our reach now.” On February 24, Shackleton ordered the cessation of ship routine, and the Endurance officially became a winter station.

Having battled valiantly through 1,000 miles of pack ice in six weeks, the Endurance had come within a single day's journey of her landing base. Now exhausted by futile attempts to cut their ship free, Shackleton and his men could only watch helplessly as the Endurance's drift carried them out of sight of land. The fateful turn of events affected no one more than Shackleton. Not only was he burdened with the responsibility of keeping his diverse company in good health and spirits throughout a polar winter, but he had to swallow bitter personal disappointment. He was forty years old, and the Endurance expedition had taken formidable energy to assemble. With a war under way at home, it was unlikely that he would have another opportunity of returning to the south anytime soon; this was his last shot. Although for some while it remained theoretically possible that the expedition could proceed in the spring, when the breakup of the pack would release his ship, Shackleton was realistic enough to know that every passing day made this increasingly impossible.

“It was more than tantalizing, it was maddening,” wrote Alexander Macklin, one of the ship's two surgeons, in his diary. “Shackleton at this time showed one of his sparks of real greatness. He did not rage at all, or show outwardly the slightest sign of disappointment; he told us simply and calmly that we must winter in the Pack, explained its dangers and possibilities; never lost his optimism, and prepared for Winter.”

“The actual cutting out of the ice with picks & saws is difficult enough but lifting the blocks, some of which weigh as much as 3 and 4 hundred weight, out of the water, hauling them away, breaking them up…entails much hard work.” ( Lees, diary)

Meanwhile, Huberht Hudson, the navigator, repeatedly tried the ship's wireless to get signals from the Falklands, the nearest transmitting stations, but without success. The expedition was not only out of sight of land. No one in the world knew where it was.

“All hands again attack the ice and we work the ship a third of the way to the lead ahead.” ( Hurley, diary)

Trying to free the Endurance

“All hands hard at it till midnight when a survey is made of the remaining ⅔ some 400 yards. It is reluctantly determined to relinquish the task as the remainder of the ice is unworkable.” (Hurley, diary)

Endurance in the ice

Hurley noted that the pack frequently resembled a billowing