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Ayush Bhattacharjee
10 August 2024 |
On 8 August 1914, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton led a British mission from England, the Endurance Expedition, formally known as the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent from the Weddell Sea coast to the Ross Sea coast via the South Pole from 1914 to 1917.
The Endurance Expedition
Sir Ernest Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish explorer popularly known for his expeditions to Antarctica. Previously, he joined Robert Falcon Scott’s British National (Discovery) Antarctic Expedition as a Third Lieutenant in 1901 and later in 1908, he led his own expedition known as the British Antarctic (Nimrod) Expedition.
During the planning of the Endurance Expedition, the possibility of World War was looming. Sir Shackleton volunteered to cancel the expedition and offered the ship, Endurance at the disposal of the government. However, the First Sea Lord and Prime Minister of the UK, Winston Churchill instructed him to proceed. The Expedition was planned to head South but Sir Shackleton avoided the Falkland Islands because of the possibility of being attacked by the Imperial German Navy. Thus, it was planned to set out from the previously unexplored region of the Weddell Sea which is located in the South of South America, to the Pole and then to the Ross Sea which is located to the South of New Zealand.
Constructed in a Norwegian shipyard, the Endurance ship was built to withstand the Polar climatic conditions and was intended for cruises to the Arctic. The 144-foot-long ship was equipped with extra-thick wood planks to protect the ship against destruction from the pack ice floating in the Southern Ocean.
While Shackleton led the Endurance crew to set off for the Pole from the Weddell Sea, another separate party called the Ross Party was bound on the ship Aurora. It was tasked to place depot and food supplies to support the Endurance crew in the second part of their expedition (from the South Pole to the Ross Sea).
The Endurance Expedition was overwhelmed with applications from volunteers to join the crew despite the tragic end of Robert Scott and his team after reaching the South Pole in 1912. The crew of Endurance consisted of 27 men (plus one stowaway), 69 sledge dogs and Mrs. Chippy, a cat. It comprised an engineer, a surgeon, a geologist, a photographer, artists, carpenters, a cook and a stoker. Sir Shackleton appointed Frank Worsley as the captain of the expedition ship.
On 8 August 1914, the Endurance sailed from Plymouth, England via Buenos Aires, Argentina for Grytviken, a Norwegian whaling station on South Georgia Island. The Endurance made its way through thousand miles of pack ice for over six weeks and was one-day sail away from its destination when the ice closed in around the ship on 18 January 1915. By the end of February, temperatures fell to -20 degrees Celsius and the ship froze in for the winter. This setback was not foreseen by the Endurance crew.
On 23 October, Shackleton’s crew decided to abandon the ship due to it being crushed under the pressure of the ice. Boats, gear and sledges were lowered from the ship onto the ice and camps were established on an ice floe a mile and a half away from Endurance. On 21 November 1915, Endurance broke apart and sank below the ice and water of the Weddell Sea. The crew saved as many supplies as they could before the ship sank. As Spring was setting in, the ice started to break up. On 20 December, Sir Shackleton decided to abandon the camps and march to the nearest land at Paulet Island.
On 9 April 1916, the crew had to bind themselves on the three lifeboats – James Caird, Dudley Docker and Stancomb Wills due to the increasing fragility of the ice. On 12 April, Shackleton found Elephant Island and made landfall after 497 days since they set foot on land. Shackleton decided to travel to the whaling station in South Georgia to rescue the stranded 28 men.
Legacy of the Endurance
The Endurance was a failed expedition; however, it depicts a story about the perseverance, dedication and leadership of Sir Ernest Shackleton. The story of survival against the extremities has consolidated Sir Ernest Shackleton’s image along with other heroic figures of Antarctic exploration like Robert Falcon Scott and Ronald Amundsen. Ernest Shackleton’s journal Diary of a Survivor and Frank Hurley’s photo documentation provide an in-depth depiction of the eventualities that the crew faced and survived.
106 years later, on 5 March 2022, the Endurance22 Expedition of Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust located the wreck of Shackleton’s Endurance under 10,000 feet of the Weddell Sea.
About the author
Ayush Bhattacharjee is a. Undergraduate student of the Department of International Relations, Peace and Public Policy, St Joseph’s University, Bengaluru.
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