Alexander, presents the story in such a way as to involve us in the lives of the men of this expedition by including details from original documents that serve to make each of them truly human and interesting. Alexander’s obviously exhaustive research and Frank Hurley’s amazing photographs, a reader would be inclined to think that this was fiction.
Not since reading John Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” have I been brought to witness deeds and events such as these. Yet we are mesmerized by the feats of human endurance and courage we encounter in books such as this one. The great majority of us would never agree to join an expedition such as the one described in Caroline Alexander’s account of the Shakelton-led party to cross Antarctica by land. Published in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural History's 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. 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. The survival of Hurley's remarkable images is scarcely less miraculous: The original glass plate negatives, from which most of the book's 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. Together, text and image re-create the terrible beauty of Antarctica, the awful destruction of the ship, and the crew's heroic daily struggle to stay alive, a miracle achieved largely through Shackleton's inspiring leadership. And she presents the astonishing work of Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer whose visual record of the adventure has never before been published comprehensively.
Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, Caroline Alexander gives us a riveting account of Shackleton's expedition-one of history's greatest epics of survival. Their ordeal would last for twenty months, and they would make two near-fatal attempts to escape by open boat before their final rescue. Soon the ship was crushed like matchwood, leaving the crew stranded on the floes. 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. 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.
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