Endurance: Shackleton's Rescue Journey

After a month at Grytviken, the Norwegian whaling station on South Georgia, Endurance sailed for the Antarctic on 5 December 1914. The whaling captains had warned Shackleton that the ice had come unusually far north that season. It would be seventeen months before any of the crew saw a human settlement again. Shackleton came back to South Georgia on his next expedition and died aboard his ship there on 5 January 1922; at his wife's request he was buried in Grytviken's whalers' cemetery.

Visitor guidance: Expedition cruise ships call at Grytviken, where visitors can see Shackleton's grave, the old whaling station and the South Georgia Museum.

In January 1915 the ship was frozen into the pack ice within sight of the Antarctic coast, and drifted with it through the whole polar winter. In October the pressure of the floes began to crush her, and on 27 October Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship. The men camped on the ice nearby and watched her finally slip under on 21 November 1915. The wreck was found on 5 March 2022 by the Endurance22 expedition, 3,008 metres down and remarkably well preserved.

For five months the men drifted north on the ice at Ocean Camp and Patience Camp. When the floe broke up, they took to the three boats on 9 April 1916 and after a week at sea made the first landing ever made on Elephant Island. They moved to a narrow spit, later called Point Wild, and built a hut from the two remaining boats laid upside down on low stone walls. Here 22 men under Frank Wild lived on seal and penguin for four and a half months, keeping a constant lookout for a ship.

Nobody would ever search Elephant Island, so on 24 April 1916 Shackleton and five men set off in the James Caird, a 22½-foot ship's boat decked over with canvas, to fetch help from South Georgia, 800 miles away across the stormiest ocean on earth. Frank Worsley navigated by the sun on the few days it showed. After sixteen days and a struggle with hurricane-force winds off the coast, they scrambled ashore in Cave Cove, King Haakon Bay, on the night of 10 May — on the wrong, uninhabited side of the island.

The boat was too battered to sail round the coast, so three men left the others under the upturned James Caird at a camp they called Peggotty Camp and set off across the unmapped mountains and glaciers of the interior: Shackleton, Worsley and Tom Crean. They had no tent; the carpenter had driven screws from the boat into the soles of their boots for grip on the ice. They walked for 36 hours almost without stopping. All three later said it often felt as if a fourth person walked with them.

Location precision: The crossing has no single spot; the pin marks Peggotty Bluff in King Haakon Bay, where it began.

At seven in the morning on 20 May, from the hills above Stromness, they heard the station's steam whistle: "the first sound created by an outside human agency that had come to our ears since we left Stromness Bay in December 1914." Three ragged men walked down into the whaling station, where its manager, Thoralf Sørlle, gave them baths, food and clothes. When Worsley came round by boat to fetch the men at Peggotty Camp, clean and shaven, they did not recognise him. The station closed in 1931 and is now a ruin.

Getting back to Elephant Island took three failed attempts through the winter ice. The fourth used Yelcho, a small steam tug lent by the Chilean Navy and commanded by Captain Luis Pardo. On 30 August 1916 the fog lifted off Point Wild and the camp was spotted. From the boat Shackleton called out, "Are you all well?" and Wild answered, "We are all well, boss." Within an hour all 22 men were aboard, bound for Punta Arenas. Not one of the expedition's 28 men had been lost.

Location precision: The rescue happened off Point Wild; the pin marks Punta Arenas, the Yelcho's home port, where the men were taken.