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in Buenos Aires in 1914, but the ship carrying his message was torpedoed, so that no one knew where he was. On return to civilization in 1916, he, like others of the crew, had to find his own way home—officers and scientists returned on a liner—and eventually got a passage as a “distressed British seaman.” Back in England, he discovered that his parents had cashed in his life insurance policy and that his girlfriend had married. He moved to Hull to be with his mates, the unsympathetic trawlerhands. After the war, he continued his career as a ship's cook, and also gave lantern slide lectures on the expedition. Excerpts from an interview suggest that these lectures may have contained erroneous, eccentric details (all food lost when the Endurance was tilted on her side! dogs disembarked to lighten the ship!). During a tour of duty in New Zealand, he gave his lecture in Wellington, where he met McNish, who had been let out of hospital for the occasion. When Green saw McNish in the audience, he invited him up to the stand, where the carpenter took the lecture over and “gave the boat journey.” Green died in 1974, at the age of eighty-six, of peritonitis.

Lionel Greenstreet's war service had begun in Buenos Aires, when he took command of a tug returning to Britain. During the Second World War, he served on rescue tugs in the Atlantic. He retired to Devon, although he still kept up his London Club. He retained his somewhat breezy, caustic sense of humor to the end. He was mistakenly reported as dead in 1964, and took great pleasure in informing the newspapers that his obituary was premature. He died in March 1979, at the age of eighty-nine, having been the last of the Endurance survivors. While it is not difficult to conjure up the long-past events of the expedition, it bankrupts the imagination to try to conceive that a man who sailed with Shackleton in the barquentine Endurance would live to see others walk upon the moon.

In Hurley's photographic record of the Endurance, perhaps the single most memorable and representative image depicts a line of ragged men standing on the beach of Elephant Island, wildly cheering as the lifeboat from the Yelcho heaves into view; Hurley called it “The Rescue.” When published by Worsley in his memoir, Endurance, however, this same scene is entitled “The Departure of the James Caird from Elephant Island.” The original film negative, in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, shows that the Caird has been violently scratched out, leaving the supply boat—the Stancomb Wills—and her waving crew as they make their way back to land. The explanation for Hurley's action is simple: An appropriately climactic photographic ending to the story was needed for the lectures.

Hurley's predilection for “fiddling” with his images was usually harmless, but in this case, he committed a grave indiscretion, for the original, irretrievable image was the greater. In it, he captured both sides of this impossible story, the razor's edge of its endeavor—success and failure in the balance, the momentous departure and the patient bravery of those left behind to wait, their hands raised boldly in a determined, resigned, and courageous farewell.

“The Departure of the James Caird from Elephant Island.”

Haircutting tournament

“No dogs out today as it is to dark crew ice ship we all had our hair cut to the scalp & then had our photograph taken after in the Ritz we do look a lot of convicts & we are not much short of that life at present.” (McNish, diary)

Acknowledgments

The number of institutions and individuals who have helped me on this book is very great. I would first like to acknowledge the American Museum of Natural History for their collaboration on both this book and the exhibition that it accompanies. The exhibition, Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Expedition, will display virtually all the Frank Hurley photographs to survive the expedition, as well as all known surviving objects—including, courtesy of Dulwich College, the James Caird. The exhibition was made possible by a major gift from