Book Description
In August 1914, days before the outbreak of the First
World War, the renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew
of twenty-seven set sail for the South Atlantic in pursuit of
the last unclaimed prize in the history of exploration: the
first crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent. Weaving a
treacherous path through the freezing Weddell Sea, they had
come within eighty-five miles of their destination when their
ship, Endurance, was trapped fast in the ice pack. Soon the
ship was crushed like matchwood, leaving the crew stranded on
the floes. Their ordeal would last for twenty months, and
they would make two near-fatal attempts to escape by open
boat before their final rescue.
Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, Caroline
Alexander gives us a riveting account of Shackleton's
expedition--one of history's greatest epics of survival. And
she presents the astonishing work of Frank Hurley, the
Australian photographer whose visual record of the adventure
has never before been published comprehensively. Together,
text and image re-create the terrible beauty of Antarctica,
the awful destruction of the ship, and the crew's heroic
daily struggle to stay alive, a miracle achieved largely
through Shackleton's inspiring leadership.
The survival of Hurley's remarkable images is scarcely less
miraculous: The original glass plate negatives, from which
most of the book's illustrations are superbly reproduced,
were stored in hermetically sealed cannisters that survived
months on the ice floes, a week in an open boat on the polar
seas, and several more months buried in the snows of a rocky
outcrop called Elephant Island. Finally Hurley was forced to
abandon his professional equipment; he captured some of the
most unforgettable images of the struggle with a pocket
camera and three rolls of Kodak film.
Published in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural
History's landmark exhibition on Shackleton's journey, The
Endurance thrillingly recounts one of the last great
adventures in the Heroic Age of exploration--perhaps the
greatest of them all.
