The Endurance. An exhibition and also a book by Caroline Alexander,
Bloomsbury, £20, ISBN 074754123X
ON 1 August 1914, the Endurance sailed from the Port of London carrying 55
sailors and scientists—and one photographer—on what would be the
last of the heroic expeditions to the poles. Conventional accounts centre on the
expedition leader, Ernest Shackleton, but the real star of the show was the
Australian photographer Frank Hurley. His superbly composed and starkly
beautiful photographs steal the scene and define our reminiscence of the
Shackleton and company were chasing the “last first” of exploration. The
North Pole had long since been “discovered”. Norway’s Roald Amundsen had beaten
Robert Scott and Shackleton to the South Pole in December 1911. So Shackleton
set out to be the first to cross Antarctica.
He failed. The Endurance—wooden-hulled and steam-powered, but
full-rigged for sail as well—was trapped in pack ice off the continent.
Ship and crew drifted in its frigid embrace for ten months before the Endurance
was crushed, and sank. The men survived five more months on the ice and when it
broke up in spring they managed to reach Elephant Island, off the tip of the
Antarctic Peninsula, in open boats.
Hurley’s most striking images were recorded, in black and white, on the
standard glass-plate cameras of the time. He managed to salvage most of his
fragile negatives from the wrecked Endurance, and then used a tiny Vest Pocket
Kodak to chronicle the journeys across ice and water, right up to the final
rescue from Elephant Island.
The 150 images in the exhibition include rare colour transparencies made by a
now forgotten process. There is also movie footage, for Hurley had a cine
camera, too. Caroline Alexander’s book has more photos, but no colour. We see
the sled dogs outside their ice “dogloos”. And the men, wrapped in wool and
beards, smoking and eating seals and penguins. And, most of all, the dark
Endurance herself, caught and then crushed by the gleaming white ice. The
exhibition opens with a set of maps showing how little was known of Antarctica
until very recently. Shackleton had no maps showing the continent’s interior. No
one succeeded in crossing Antarctica until 1956.
Shackleton did achieve one dramatic first crossing, but not before an even
more strenuous chapter in the history of heroic failures. With five others he
climbed into a six-metre open boat, the James Caird, and pushed off into the
ocean to face the Cape Horn rollers, which regularly overwhelmed much larger
vessels. Skipper Frank Worsley navigated the Caird across 1300 kilometres of
open ocean to reach South Georgia and call in help for the stranded sailors. But
the crew hit land on the opposite side of South Georgia from its only
habitation, the whaling station, and had to trek across its unmapped
An interactive demonstration allows visitors to get at least a glimmer of
what it was like for Worsley to take “snaps” of the Sun and fix the boat’s
position. In 17 days, the clouds cleared enough to see the Sun just four times,
but this sufficed to guide the boat on its voyage to safety. Next to the
sextants and a video of high seas projected behind them stands the James Caird
herself which has never before been taken to the US.
The exhibition is at the American Museum of Natural History,
New York, from 10 April to 11 October