Ernest Shackleton sailed south in 1914 to cross Antarctica on foot. He never set foot on the continent. On 19 January 1915 his ship, Endurance, froze into the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, according to Royal Museums Greenwich. For months the ice squeezed the hull, and the ship sank on 21 November 1915. The crew camped on the drifting ice with three small boats and, in April 1916, reached Elephant Island, a bare rock more than 800 miles from the nearest inhabited land.
Nobody in the outside world knew where they were, so nobody was coming. On 24 April 1916 Shackleton set out with five men in the James Caird, a lifeboat 22.5 feet long, for the whaling stations of South Georgia. Frank Worsley, Tom Crean, Harry McNish, Tim McCarthy and John Vincent went with him. The other 22 men stayed behind under two upturned boats.
The voyage took 16 days through the Southern Ocean in winter. Worsley, the navigator, had a chronometer, two sextants and his tables, but a sextant needs the sun, and the sky was nearly always covered. The historian Daniella McCahey writes that he got four solid fixes on the whole voyage. Worsley called the rest "a merry jest of guesswork". A small miss would have sent the boat past South Georgia into open ocean.
They hit the island, but on the south coast, at King Haakon Bay. The whaling station at Stromness was on the other side, and the boat was too battered to sail round. Nobody had ever crossed the island's interior. Shackleton, Worsley and Crean drove screws through the soles of their boots for grip and walked for about 36 hours, reaching Stromness at 7 in the morning on 20 May 1916, says New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust.
Getting back to Elephant Island took several tries through the ice. On 30 August 1916 Shackleton arrived on the Chilean navy tug Yelcho and found all 22 men alive. Every one of the 28 men of the Endurance survived.
The ship itself was found on 5 March 2022 by the Endurance22 expedition, 3,008 metres down in the Weddell Sea, about four miles from the position Worsley had recorded in 1915, according to the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust.
