SHIPWRECK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD

This is my final blog post. This probably won't be my last blog post, but this is my finals blog. I decided to do mine on the Antartic survival story of the 29 men on board the Endurance. I read a book called Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World by Jennifer Armstrong. The book is really good, I'd recommend it to anyone who likes survival stories. Their ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the ice pack around Antartica, and they spent a year and a half floating around on the ice trying to get to safety. Amazingly, all of them survived.

Ernest Shackleton was the leader of the expedition. Their mission was to be the first people to cross Antartica. A few years earlier the South Pole was reached, but no one had gone across the continent. So in 1914, Shackleton set out on the expedition stopping on the island of South Georgia first.

That year the ice pack was really bad. The Endurance inched its way closer to the continent, but on January 19, 1915, the ship became stuck in the ice. They were forced to wait out the winter on the ice. But during the winter, (which is during our summer) storms came and on October 27, 1915, the Endurance was crushed by the ice. The men were forced to abandon the ship with their lifeboats and necessary equipment. On November 21, 1915, they watched from a few miles a way, they watched their ship sink into the water. They were now alone on the ice, and the only way of surviving would be to launch their lifeboats and try to find a nearby island and await rescue. For about the next six months, they man-hauled their boats across the ice. They lived off seals that they shot. On April 9, they launched their boats from the edge of the ice pack and reached the uninhabited Elephant Island a few days later. No one had ever landed on the island before.

Shackleton made a decision. He decided that he and five other men would make the dangerous 800 mile voyage in one of the lifeboats back to South Georgia while the rest of the men waited on the island for rescue. The voyage was extremely dangerous, if it failed, they would never be found. After surviving fierce storms and a monster wave, they reached South Georgia on May 1oth, 1916. They landed on the opposite end of the harbor, and had to trek across the mountains that were named "the Southern Alps." The mountains on the island had never been explored before.

A few months later the rest of them were picked up on the island. Most people had given them up for dead. Against tremendous odds, they all made it back. Shackleton was an incredible leader, and without him, it might have ended disastrously.

Their ship, the Endurance, when it was stuck in the ice pack.

Ernest Henry Shackleton

This is a link to a story of the voyage, with pictures from the photographer, Frank Hurley, who used a Kodak camera to document the voyage.