The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition

Written by Caroline Alexander
Review by Edward James

This is a reprint of a book published in 1998, so there is no mention of the recent discovery of the wreck of the Endurance beneath the ice of the Weddell Sea and hence no underwater photographs. Instead we have wonderful black-and-white pictures taken by the Shackleton expedition’s gifted photographer, Frank Hurley, in 1914-15.

The photos are the glory of the book, taken though they were with clumsy equipment under extreme conditions.  Their lack of colour gives them a stark beauty, worthy of the cruel grandeur of Antarctica.  They tend to overshadow the text, but the text tells an amazing and improbable story which merits retelling even though most of us know it in outline.  The ship did not endure, but for the men it was one of the great epics of endurance.

Alexander has followed up the later lives of all the members of the expedition—

incredibly they all survived!  Most later lives were an anti-climax, and some were tragic, including that of Shackleton himself.