Endurance: The Greatest Adventure Story Every Told

Second-Hand (Hardcover)

As New condition

In December 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven men set sail from South Georgia for the South Pole on board the Endurance

The object of the expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland. A month later the ship was beset in the ice of the Weddell Sea just outside the Antarctic Circle, 'frozen like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar'.

As the desolation of the eternal polar nights began, the temperature dropped to 35 degrees Celsius below zero. Ten months later, on 24 October 1915, the Endurance was being crushed by the ice floes - 'wringing animal-like screams from her as they sought to break her back' - and Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship.

For seventeen months the crew, drifting on the ice pack and then on the stormiest seas on the globe, were castaways in this most savage region. Finally, Shackleton led seven of his crew on an 850-mile voyage in a twenty-two-foot open lifeboat to find help.

Frank Hurley, the photographer of the expedition, miraculously saved his negatives and photographs from destruction at each stage of the journey. They present a unique visual record of the struggles to survive: the men were attacked by sea leopards, had to kill their beloved dogs whom they could no longer feed, and developed terrible frostbite - an operation to amputate the foot of one member of the crew was carried out on the ice. Hurley's photographs also evoke the dramatic, terrible beauty of the land.

Together Lansing's narrative, based on firsthand accounts of crew members and interviews with them, and Hurley's spectacular photographs, famous in their own right in the annals of polar exploration, provide an unsurpassable insight into the extraordinary spirit of Shackleton and his men, and their indefatigability and lasting civility towards one another in the most adverse conditions conceivable.