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Explorers are amongst the hardiest of human beings. While some might say that certain expeditions are downright foolish, it's the willingness of explorers to take unbelievable risks that propel humankind into the unknown, and push the known limits of human endurance. Endurance is the fitting name of the ship piloted by the British explorer Edward Shackleton on a journey to the Antarctica from 1914-1917. The survival test that Shackleton and his men passed during those years is nothing short of Unbreakable.
At the time, the Endurace's mission to the South Pole was known as the "the last great journey on earth." World War One had just broken out, but Shackleton knew that if his crew successfully competed their quest to reach the South Pole, it would be a great morale booster for his mother country.
When the Endurance reached the Weddell Sea near Antarctica, it became lodged in rough and very thick pack ice. The crew disembarked, and set up camp on the dangerous ice. This began an excruciating 281-day wait for the ice to disperse. The men subsisted off a diet heavily dependent on the seals they caught. For inspiration, Shackleton consulted the Bible's Book of Job, where Job and his family are set up by continuous hardship but never lose faith. At the end of the 9-month wait, the crew of the Endurace returned to their ship only to find it crushed by the ice. The men salvaged what they could from the ship, and when conditions improved, they launched their small boats and made for deserted Elephant Island.
The trip to Elephant Island was a success. Once Shackleton's crew set up camp; however, cracks in the ice (caused occasionally by killer whales, whose ugly snouts could be seen pushing up through the ice) necessitated the shifting of their fragile campsite to another ice floe. By this point some of the crewmen were in grave physical condition, and Shackleton decided that they would not survive if they were forced to endure a winter on Elephant Island. So Shackleton and five of his sturdiest men boarded a twenty-foot whaleboat and headed off to seek help. The sea pitched the craft violently, and Shackleton had only a manual sextant to use for guidance. A mistake of a single degree in navigation would have put them hopelessly off course. Severe dehydration set in, swelling the men's tongues; the sea spray lashing their faces turned their thirst into burning pains. The boat was rocked and nearly sunk by a wave that Shackleton deemed more gigantic than any he had seen in 26 years of seagoing. But for 16 days Shackleton kept on course, covering 800 miles of open sea until reaching South Georgia Island. Unfortunately, they landed on the wrong side of the island, and had to hike over a mountain range of ice in their exhausted state.
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| Finally they reached a whaling station, and Shackleton immediately began planning to head back to rescue the remainder of his crew. On the first try, pack ice again blocked Shackleton's path, a mere 70 miles from his destination. He tried again in an Uruguayan trawler, but with the island within sight, was forced to turn back again because of ice. His next attempt in an old schooner also proved unsuccessful due to storm swells. At last, the Chilean government loaned Shackleton a tugboat. He sailed in back to Elephant Island, where the men had been waiting 14 months for his return. Reunited they returned to England. Of the 56 men who had set out on the expedition, 53 survived over two years in a constant climate of subzero temperatures, gale force winds, isolation, starvation, and loss of hope. The Endurance may have been broken by pack ice, the Endurance crew themselves were Unbreakable.
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