Sir Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922) had been the third-in-command of Scott’s 1901–1904 Discovery expedition and the leader of the 1907–1909 Nimrod expedition that had set a record for furthest south at 88° 23’ (88 miles short of the Pole). Amundsen’s December 1911 Pole attainment had removed the last available significant Antarctic exploration prize. By 1913 Shackleton had identified the next available substantial prize: a crossing of the Antarctic continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, traversing the South Pole en route — approximately 1,800 miles overland.
The expedition’s main ship — the Norwegian-built Endurance — sailed from London on 1 August 1914, three days before Britain declared war on Germany. Shackleton offered the ship to the Admiralty; the Admiralty told him to proceed. The expedition reached South Georgia on 5 November 1914 and sailed south into the Weddell Sea on 5 December 1914 with 28 men, 70 dogs, and provisions for two years.
The beset
The 1914–1915 Antarctic summer pack ice in the Weddell Sea was unusually heavy. The Endurance was beset — held immobile by the pack — on 19 January 1915, approximately 200 miles short of her intended landing point at Vahsel Bay on the Antarctic continent’s Weddell coast. She drifted with the ice over the next ten months, generally northwest, while the men lived on the ship and continued routine scientific observations.
The ice pressure on the hull progressively increased through autumn 1915 (Antarctic March-April). The hull was crushed inward in successive grinding events; on 27 October 1915 Shackleton ordered the ship abandoned. The 28 men camped on the ice surface 100 yards from the listing wreck. The Endurance finally sank on 21 November 1915 — Shackleton recorded the moment in his diary as “She’s gone, boys” — at approximately 68° 39’ S, 52° 26’ W, on the floor of the Weddell Sea at a depth that would later be measured at 3,008 metres.
What they did next
The men camped on the ice for the next five months as the ice pack drifted north and gradually broke up beneath them. On 9 April 1916 the breaking-up ice forced them into the three lifeboats they had salvaged from the Endurance — the James Caird, the Dudley Docker, and the Stancomb Wills.
They sailed and rowed approximately 100 miles northwest through pack ice and open sea over seven days and reached the uninhabited rocky volcanic island of Elephant Island on 15 April 1916 — the first solid ground any of them had stood on since December 1914.
Elephant Island was 700 miles from any human settlement. No rescue would come there. Shackleton’s only option was to take a small party south to South Georgia — the nearest inhabited location — and bring back a rescue ship.
The James Caird
On 24 April 1916 Shackleton and five companions (the ship’s captain Frank Worsley, the navigator’s instinct on which everything depended; the second officer Tom Crean; the carpenter Harry McNish; and the sailors John Vincent and Tim McCarthy) departed Elephant Island in the 22-foot James Caird — partly decked over with salvaged canvas and packing-case wood — for South Georgia.
The voyage was approximately 800 miles through the southern ocean in a winter storm season. Worsley’s navigation depended on four brief sun-sightings through cloud breaks across the entire 17-day voyage. They reached the south coast of South Georgia on 10 May 1916.
The whaling stations were on the north coast. Worsley, exhausted, was not capable of sailing the boat around the island. Shackleton, Crean, and Worsley walked across the unmapped interior of South Georgia — over the central mountain ridge — to the Stromness whaling station, arriving 36 hours later. The South Georgia interior crossing was the first traverse of the island.
The whaling-station manager Thoralf Sørlle initially did not recognise the three men who arrived at his door. They were unrecognisable. Shackleton’s first words were, reportedly, “My name is Shackleton.”
The rescue
Shackleton organised a rescue ship within days. The first three attempts to break through the pack ice back to Elephant Island failed because of weather. The fourth attempt — on the Chilean steam tug Yelcho under Captain Luis Pardo — succeeded on 30 August 1916, four and a half months after Shackleton had departed Elephant Island in the James Caird.
All 22 men left on Elephant Island had survived. The three on South Georgia and the three with Shackleton had survived. Twenty-eight men had left the Endurance in November 1915; twenty-eight reached safety in August 1916. No deaths.
What Shackleton did with what was left of his life
Shackleton returned to England via the Falklands and the United States in 1917. The First World War absorbed most British attention. He served briefly in northern Russia in 1918–1919. He died of a heart attack at South Georgia on 5 January 1922 at the start of a new Antarctic expedition, aged 47. He is buried at the Grytviken cemetery on South Georgia.
The wreck
The Endurance’s position at sinking was known only from Frank Worsley’s 1915 sextant observations — accurate but with the uncertainty inherent in sextant navigation on a heaving deck. The first systematic 21st-century search expedition (Weddell Sea 2019) failed. The second — Endurance22, organised by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust — located the wreck on 5 March 2022 approximately 4 miles south of Worsley’s 1915 estimate.
The wreck is preserved by the extreme cold and absence of wood-boring marine organisms in the Weddell Sea. The masts and yards are still rigged. The ship’s wheel is intact. The brass plate with the ship’s name ENDURANCE across the stern is legible from the survey photographs. The 107-year-old wreck looks essentially as it did at the moment of sinking.
It is a protected historic site under the Antarctic Treaty. No physical recovery is planned. The 28 men who left her in November 1915 have, for the present, the same status as the wreck: visible in photographs, untouched, and surviving on the seafloor of the Weddell Sea.