The story of how all 28 of them did get home — through a sequence of boat journeys, overland crossings, and improbable rescues that took until August 30, 1916, almost two years after the Endurance had left London — is one of the most thoroughly documented survival stories in the history of polar exploration. It was documented in diaries, in official accounts, in photographs taken by an Australian photographer who dived into freezing water to save his glass-plate negatives. And it has continued to accumulate evidence: in 2022, a search expedition found the wreck of the Endurance on the floor of the Weddell Sea, 3,008 meters down, still upright, still legible, the ship’s name still visible on the stern.
—
## The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
To understand what the men of the Endurance were doing in the Weddell Sea in the winter of 1915, it is necessary to understand the particular moment in polar history when Shackleton conceived the expedition.
By 1914, both poles had been reached. Robert Falcon Scott had died returning from the South Pole in 1912, three years after American Robert Peary had claimed the North Pole. The era of first arrivals was effectively over. What remained, Shackleton argued, was the crossing — a traverse of the Antarctic continent from one coast to the other, through the South Pole. No one had done it. No one had come close. Shackleton proposed to do it with two parties: one, his own, landing on the Weddell Sea side and crossing through the pole; the other, the Ross Sea party, landing on the far side and laying food depots across the Ross Ice Shelf to supply Shackleton’s men on the homeward leg of the crossing.