The Legend Of Ernest Shackleton And His Insane Rescue Mission

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**Matt Walsh** (0:30)
In January of 1915, Ernest Shackleton, the captain of the ship Endurance, was trapped in the ice along with his vessel and 27 crew members, about 85 miles from his intended landing point in Antarctica. It was what passes for summer in that part of the world, which meant temperatures hovered around negative 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Within a few short months, winter would settle in fully, temperatures dropping toward negative 30 and the sun disappearing entirely for weeks at a time.
During the blizzards that swept across the region, wind chills could fall to extreme levels thanks to sustained winds of 60 to 70 miles an hour. In those conditions, exposed skin freezes within a matter of seconds. Severe hypothermia follows soon after, then unconsciousness, then death. The 28 men of the endurance were then trapped in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth. The conditions were already severe and they were only going to get worse, much worse. But the situation was even more dangerous than that. A ship trapped in Antarctic pack ice is not like a car buried in snow on your driveway. The vessel was not resting on something stable or fixed. The ice itself is a shifting, grinding, violent mass of enormous slabs constantly in motion, compressing and colliding with whatever lay between them. When the wind rose, the ice would buckle into pressure ridges, towering walls of frozen blocks of ice that could rise 15 feet or more. Slow moving but immensely powerful, like icy battering ramps.
Shackleton could attempt to remain aboard the Adorans and wait for the ice to release them when it melts. But he also understood that there was no guarantee it ever would. It might be weeks, it might be months, it might even be years. In 1829, for example, the British explorer John Ross became trapped in arctic ice and remained frozen in place for four entire years before finally breaking free. In 1845, another British expedition under the famous John Franklin set out in search of the Northwest Passage and became trapped in arctic ice aboard his ships, the Erebus and Terror. Franklin and several of his men died in the stranded ships, waiting for the ice to melt, which it never did. The remaining survivors eventually abandoned ship, tried to march south and they were never seen again. But the real danger the one Shackleton would have been thinking about in January of 1915 was not simply being trapped, it was what came next. If the endurance were crushed by the ice and sank, the men would be left stranded on the drifting ice, exposed and isolated with no ship, no shelter, and no supplies beyond what they could carry. They would be adrift on a frozen ocean, dozens of miles from the nearest solid land, which itself was an empty, hostile wasteland.
If you're looking for an environment comparable to Antarctica, just to give you an idea, you won't find it on Earth. In practical terms, it's closer to another planet than anything most people have experienced on Earth. Indeed, being stranded there in 1915 would have felt less like being lost somewhere on Earth and more like being stranded on Mars.
And in fact, 90 years later in 2005, a French-Italian research facility named Concordia Station would be established on the Antarctica Plateau. The station, dubbed White Mars, is still used as a Mars analog by scientists to study the effect of Martian weather and isolation on human beings. And this is where Shackleton and his men were now trapped. The only saving grace for Shackleton was that, at least at first, food was not an immediate concern. The endurance had been well-provisioned. Bacon, rice, canned meats, other preserved stores, including supplies intended to prevent scurvy, which is a horrific disease caused by vitamin C deficiency that had killed thousands of sailors across centuries of exploration. And most importantly, of course, there was rum and lots of it. But if the ship were crushed by the ice, as Shackleton already understood, those stores would be lost, almost all of them, beneath the sea. From that point forward, survival would depend on what could be taken from the environment itself. Penguins, seals, seabirds when available. And when those inevitably ran out, there remained only one last resource, the sled dogs. By early 1916, with food supplies exhausted and the men on the edge of starvation, each of the dogs would be taken away behind the ice, out of sight of the others, and killed for food. It was done quietly without ceremony, and those who carried it out later described it as the worst moment of the entire expedition. But standing on the Endurance in 1915, looking out across the pack ice, stretching to every horizon, Ernest Shackleton could not have been entirely surprised. He knew exactly what he was getting himself into. This was Shackleton's third expedition to the frozen south. His first came in 1901, when at the age of 27, he joined a team led by the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott in an attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. They made it to the continent and set out overland, traveling on foot and with sled dogs. But the expedition was poorly planned. They didn't bring enough food, nor the right kind of food, and they didn't yet understand how to manage a team of sled dogs in polar conditions. They pushed farther south than anyone before them, but eventually had to turn back.