This is worth stating because the failure of the ship has sometimes been attributed to poor planning or false economy, as if a better-funded expedition would not have lost its ship. The record does not support this. The conditions the Endurance encountered in the 1914–1915 season were unusually severe even by Weddell Sea standards, and there is no guarantee that a steel-hulled ship of equivalent size would have survived them. The Aurora, the Ross Sea party’s ship, was also caught in the ice and had its moorings broken — and the Aurora was operating in the more reliably navigable waters of the Ross Sea.
The ship that was available, sailed by the crew that had assembled, into conditions that could not have been predicted precisely: this is what the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition sent south in December 1914. What happened to it is a story about the limits of human planning against the variability of natural systems, as much as it is a story about survival.
## The Cook’s Arithmetic
Charles Green was responsible for a specific and underappreciated problem: feeding 28 men adequately across a period of 22 months in conditions that progressively eliminated the resources any reasonable cook would consider essential.
The mathematics of provisioning the expedition were calculated before departure on the assumption that the crossing would proceed roughly as planned. The Endurance would spend some months in transit, establish a base on the Antarctic coast, and then Shackleton’s party would cross the continent in roughly eight months, returning to the ship at the end of the crossing. The food supply was calculated for this timeline.