There was nothing else to do but to establish a routine and wait out the winter. They had been within a day’s sailing of their landing place now the drift of the ice was slowly pushing them farther away with each passing day. Endurance was beset-in the words of one of the crew, Thomas Orde-Lees, “frozen like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar.” Suddenly, there was no way forward, nor any way back. For several weeks, the ship poked and prodded its way through leads in the ice, gingerly making its way south but on January 18, a northerly gale pressed the pack hard against the land and pushed the floes tight against each other. Two days after leaving South Georgia, Endurance entered the pack ice-the barrier of thick sea ice that stands guard around the Antarctic continent. The goal of expedition leader Shackleton, who had twice fallen short-once agonizingly so-of reaching the South Pole, was to establish a base on Antarctica’s Weddell Sea coast.įrom there a small party, including himself, would set out on the first crossing of the continent, ultimately arriving at the Ross Sea, south of New Zealand, where another group would be waiting for them, having laid depots of food and fuel along the way.

Officers and crew of the Endurance pose under the bow of the ship at Weddell Sea Base during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-17, led by Ernest Shackleton.Įndurance had left South Georgia for Antarctica on December 5, 1914, carrying 27 men (plus one stowaway, who became the ship’s steward), 69 dogs, and a tomcat erroneously dubbed Mrs.

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