Endurance

• ‘A breath-taking story of courage under the most appalling conditions’ SIR EDMUND HILLARY.
• Considered a superior first-hand account of the last voyage of HMS Endurance and the 1914-17 expedition to the Antarctic than Shackleton’s own memoir ‘SOUTH’.
• One of the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time (number 35).
• ‘One of the greatest survival stories ever told’ LIBRARY JOURNAL.

The inspiring first-hand account of Ernest Shackleton’s doomed Antarctic adventure by Frank Worsley, Captain of HMS Endurance – the expedition ship crushed to pieces after becoming icebound.

Frank Worsley, or ‘Skipper’ to his best friend Ernest Shackleton, first published his memoir of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1931. It is now regarded as an adventure survival classic and to have surpassed even Shackleton’s own account, ‘South’. The expedition of 1914–7 is considered to be the last major expedition of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Conceived by Shackleton, the expedition was an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. After Amundsen’s South Pole expedition in 1911, this crossing remained, in Shackleton’s words, the ‘one great main object of Antarctic journeyings’. It failed after the expedition ship became trapped in pack-ice in the Weddell Sea and sunk, shipwrecking and stranding its 28-man complement on the ice, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement. It is, however, the story of how Frank Worsley, Shackleton, and four others sailed a small lifeboat over 850 miles to secure the rescue of their comrades back on the ice that made the expedition a true epic of Polar exploration and endurance. Frank Worsley’s part in this voyage was pivotal, it was his feat of navigation and seamanship that made the extraordinary boat journey possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frank Arthur Worsley was born in 1872 in New Zealand. A gifted seaman and navigator, he served in the Royal Naval Reserve and Merchant Navy before joining in 1914, the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition as captain of HMS Endurance. In the First World War, he captured the Q-ship PC61 and a German U-boat. From 1921-2 he took part in Shackleton’s last expedition to the Antarctic as captain of the Quest. He wrote several books charting his seafaring and Polar achievements including ‘Shackleton’s Boat Journey’, ‘Under Sail in the Frozen North: The Log of the 1926 British Arctic Expedition’ and ‘First Voyage in a Square-Rigged Ship’. He died in 1943 aged 70.

PRAISE FOR ENDURANCE

‘Frank Worsley was Shackleton’s captain. Fortunately he was a genius’ THE NEW YORK TIMES

‘His account is brisker than the thorough Shackleton’s, but keeps the excitement intact’ NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

‘One of the most heroic rescues in history’ THE DAILY MIRROR

‘A breath-taking story of courage under the most appalling conditions’ SIR EDMUND HILLARY

‘One of the greatest survival stories ever told’ LIBRARY JOURNAL Read more