The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

Caroline Alexander's account of Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, written around the photographs Frank Hurley made on the ice and rescued from the sinking ship. Hurley smashed most of his glass plates on Shackleton's orders, keeping only what two men could carry, and the surviving images run through the book alongside the crew's diaries.

The expedition sailed in 1914 meaning to cross Antarctica on foot. The Endurance was caught in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, drifted for ten months and was crushed, leaving twenty-eight men camped on the floes with three lifeboats. Alexander follows them to Elephant Island, then across 800 miles of the Southern Ocean to South Georgia, and back for the rescue that brought every man home.

Written to accompany the American Museum of Natural History exhibition of Hurley's photographs, the book reads the expedition through what was actually recorded at the time, and gives the crew's own accounts room to disagree with each other.