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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 eighty-five 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 ordeal would last for twenty months, and they would make two near-fatal attempts to escape by open boat before their final rescue.Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, Caroline Alexander gives us a riveting account of Shackletons expedition--one of historys greatest epics of survival. And she presents the astonishing work of Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer whose visual record of the adventure has never before been published comprehensively. Together, text and image re-create the terrible beauty of Antarctica, the awful destruction of the ship, and the crews heroic daily struggle to stay alive, a miracle achieved largely through Shackletons inspiring leadership. The survival of Hurleys remarkable images is scarcely less miraculous: The original glass plate negatives, from which most of the books illustrations are superbly reproduced, were stored in hermetically sealed cannisters that survived months on the ice floes, a week in an open boat on the polar seas, and several more months buried in the snows of a rocky outcrop called Elephant Island. Finally Hurley was forced to abandon his professional equipment; he captured some of the most unforgettable images of the struggle with a pocket camera and three rolls of Kodak film.Published in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural Historys landmark exhibition on Shackleton's journey, The Endurance thrillingly recounts one of the last great adventures in the Heroic Age of exploration--perhaps the greatest of them all.

"Ms. Alexander has sensibly, and ably, concentrated on the characters and interactions of the men, as revealed in diaries and letters, and used her text as a frame for previously unpublished pictures by the expedition's Australian photographer, Frank Hurley."

Phoebe-Lou Adams, Atlantic Monthly, February 1999

"Caroline Alexander's book makes use of the fantastic photographs of [James Frank] Hurley, who was dauntless in capturing the men and the scenes of the adventure....Her writing is clear and swift, and she concentrates on the human drama while not slighting the mechanical and technical details."

David Mehegan, Boston Globe, 01/03/1999

The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition: Search Results