Endurance: An Epic Of Polar Adventure

Front Cover
W. W. Norton & Company, Feb 22, 2000 - Biography & Autobiography - 310 pages
The legendary tale of Ernest Shackleton's grueling Antarctic expedition, recounted in riveting first-person detail by the captain of HMS Endurance.

"You seriously mean to tell me that the ship is doomed?" asked Frank Worsley, commander of the Endurance, stuck impassably in Antarctic ice packs. "What the ice gets," replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's unflappable leader, "the ice keeps." It did not, however, get the ship's twenty-five crew members, all of whom survived an eight-hundred-mile voyage across sea, land, and ice to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island.

First published in 1931, Endurance tells the full story of that doomed 1914-16 expedition and incredible rescue, as well as relating Worsley's further adventures fighting U-boats in the Great War, sailing the equally treacherous waters of the Arctic, and making one final (and successful) assault on the South Pole with Shackleton. It is a tale of unrelenting high adventure and a tribute to one of the most inspiring and courageous leaders of men in the history of exploration.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Preface
xv
Foreword
xxv
We Lose the Endurance
3
Looking Back
27
On the Packice
50
We Reach Elephant Island
64
On Elephant Island
82
The Boat Journey Begins
101
The Rescue
163
Northwards Once More
180
The Ross Sea Party
198
In Northern Waters
217
Southwards Again
245
Shackleton Looks Back
266
The Death of a Hero
290
Index
303

We Reach South Georgia
123
The Crossing of South Georgia
145

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About the author (2000)

A native New Zealander, Frank A. Worsley served as a reserve officer in the Royal Navy before becoming captain of the Endurance. He commanded two ships in World War I, for which he was decorated, sailed with Shackleton again in 1921, and in 1925 was the joint leader of the British Arctic Exploration. Worsley died in 1943.

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