It was an enormously ambitious plan, and it required coordination between two ships operating 2,000 miles apart with no communication between them. The plan also required the Weddell Sea to cooperate, which it was under no obligation to do.
Shackleton called his expedition the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. He named his ship the Endurance, after his family motto: “By Endurance We Conquer.” He assembled a crew of 27, plus himself, bringing the full complement to 28. They left London on August 1, 1914, three days before Britain entered the First World War. By the time they reached South Georgia in November, the war they had left behind was already producing casualties on a scale no one had anticipated. The decision to proceed with the expedition was made. They had already come this far.
On December 5, 1914, the Endurance left the whaling station at Grytviken, South Georgia, and headed south. They were, in effect, disappearing from the world. There would be no communication with the outside for as long as the expedition lasted. No one ashore would know what was happening to them.
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## Who the Twenty-Eight Were
Any account of what happened on the Endurance needs to account for the men who experienced it, because the survival was not achieved by one person’s genius but by 28 people’s collective refusal to come apart.
Frank Wild was Shackleton’s second in command and arguably the most experienced polar hand alive. He had served on Scott’s Discovery expedition, on Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, and on two other Antarctic ventures. He had spent more time in the Antarctic than any other explorer of his era. Shackleton trusted him absolutely, and the men of the Endurance trusted him in the same way.