By: Frank Hurley The great ship caught in a pressure crack.
October 19, 1915. "At 4:45 pm slowly but surely the ship heeled
right over to port: all sorts of weird noises came up from the
engine room, and then with a rush all the unsecured dog kennels
slid down to leeward and She took a list of fully 30º in 5
seconds. It's an ill wind that blows nobody good and Hurley was
immediately out on the floe photographing the ship from every
possible position." (Wordie, diary) In August 1914, days before
the outbreak of the First World War, the renowned explorer
Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty seven set sail for the
South Atlantic in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize in the
history of exploration: the first crossing on foot of the
Antarctic continent. Weaving a treacherous path through the
freezing Weddell Sea, they had come within 85 miles of their
destination when their ship Endurance was trapped fast in the
ice pack. Soon the ship was crushed like matchwood, leaving the
crew stranded on the floes. Their ord