The Shackleton Crew Survived 22 Months on Ice With No Radio Contact

Endurance became trapped in Antarctic pack ice in January 1915, nine months before it finally sank. Ernest Shackleton and his 27-man crew spent those months living aboard a slowly crushing ship, watching the hull buckle under thousands of tons of ice pressure. On November 21, 1915, the ship went under. The men camped on the ice itself, hauling three small lifeboats across pressure ridges, surviving on seal and penguin meat.

For five months they drifted on the floe, waiting for it to break up enough to launch the boats. When it did, in April 1916, they rowed through open Antarctic water to Elephant Island — the first ground they had stood on in 497 days. It was also uninhabited and outside any shipping lane.

Shackleton took five men and the best of the three boats, the James Caird — 22 feet long — and sailed 800 miles across the Drake Passage to South Georgia Island. The Drake is among the most violent stretches of open ocean on earth; they made it in sixteen days. They landed on the wrong side of the island and crossed its unmapped glaciated interior on foot to reach the whaling station at Stromness.

The remaining 22 men were still on Elephant Island. It took Shackleton four rescue attempts to reach them — pack ice blocked the first three — and on August 30, 1916, he finally pulled all of them off the beach. Every one of the 28 men who had been aboard Endurance was alive.