—
## Frank Hurley and What He Saved
When the Endurance began to sink on November 21, 1915, Frank Hurley made a decision.
He dived into the freezing water below decks and retrieved his collection of glass-plate negatives. The plates were in cases below the waterline, and he swam for them in the dark and cold of a sinking ship and brought them to the surface.
Then he and Shackleton went through the plates together on the ice. There were more than 400. They were too heavy to carry. Hurley laid them out and chose which ones to keep, and then, to prevent himself from changing his mind later, he smashed the rejects on the ice. He kept approximately 120 glass plates and several rolls of film.
For the rest of the ordeal, he carried a Kodak Vest Pocket camera and three rolls of film. He used them. The photographs he made on Elephant Island and during the rescue are among the most remarkable documents in the history of photography, produced by a man who was simultaneously a subject of the survival story and its visual recorder.
The images Hurley made before the sinking — of the Endurance caught in ice, of the ship’s rigging in winter light, of the crew playing football on the frozen sea, of the ice pressure that eventually destroyed the hull — are the visual record of something that would otherwise exist only in written accounts. He had hauled his camera up into the ship’s rigging to get the panoramic shots that showed the ship’s situation against the ice. He had set up a darkroom aboard the ship and done his development in temperatures where washing plates, as he noted in his diary, required keeping the developing tank warm or the plates would freeze solid in the solution. His fingers split and cracked around the nails from the cold chemicals.