The Backstory: Trapped in the most inhospitable place on Earth

Polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew spent almost 2 years trapped in sub-zero desolation after their ship, The Endurance, was ice-bound and finally sank, stranding them on an ice floe. This is their story of survival and endurance.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Can you imagine traveling to the most desolate place on
Earth with the goal of exploration, only to find yourself trapped,
completely cut off from any kind of help. Well, now
imagine this happens in Antarctica more than one hundred years ago.
I'm Patty Steele, the renowned polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, and
the stunning story of the endurance that's next on the backstory.

(00:28):
The backstory is back. Okay, it's nineteen fifteen. It's toward
the end of what they call the Heroic Age of
Antarctic Exploration. Sir Ernest Shackleton was one of the main
figures of the age, leading three British expeditions to the
frozen continent, attempting to reach the South Pole and also

(00:48):
to cross Antarctica from c to sea and to be
the first guy to do it. It was that trip
that became a disaster. Shackleton dreamed of being the first
man to completelys Antarctica. Can you imagine what that trek
would have been like. We're talking sub zero temperatures with
summer falling between October and April. The average high tempts

(01:11):
are right around zero. And that's despite twenty four hours
of sunlight every day, winter averages forty five below with
lows as frigid as seventy five below zero, and utter
darkness twenty four hours a day all year round. There
are wild winds, oceans with massive icy waves and tremendous blizzards.

(01:33):
Understand something, Until more recently than you'd actually think, people
looked at the ocean pretty much the way we view
the stars today. It was a world that seemed to
contain an infinite number of possibilities, but we just didn't
know that much about it. Just as NASA and SpaceX
are advancing our goal of planning a flag in outer space,

(01:55):
hundreds of years ago, explorers devoted their lives to mapping
out the far corners of the world's oceans, and Antarctica
was a magnet for these types. In the late eighteen
hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, Shackleton was determined, and he
looked for the perfect crew. Legend has it that he
posted an ad in a London newspaper that read men

(02:17):
wanted for hazardous journey, low wages, bitter cold, long hours
of complete darkness, safe return, doubtful honor and recognition in
event of success. However, he did search for his crew
were not sure that's actually it. We do know. Shackleton
got more than five thousand applications, including a letter from

(02:39):
some women who called themselves three sporty Girls, who said
that if their feminine clothing was inconvenient, they would just
love to don masculine attire. He set off on his
trip on a ship called the Endurance, with a crew
of twenty eight, none of them, by the way, female.
It was the fall of nineteen fourteen. Their mission was

(03:00):
to reach the Wettle Sea and then begin a perilous
trek across the frozen continent. The team was a mix
of seasoned sailors, scientists, and adventurers, all handpicked by Shackleton
for their skills but also their resilience. Their spirits were
high as they left, but after reaching Antarctica, things went

(03:21):
very wrong, very fast. The Endurance encountered heavy pack ice
much earlier in the season than expected. By January of
nineteen fifteen, the ship had become hopelessly trapped in the
thick ice of the Wettle Sea. The crew tried everything
to free her, but it was impossible, and eventually they

(03:42):
had to accept their fate. They were completely trapped Now,
as the weather worsened, there didn't seem to be much
hope right. The ice wasn't just holding them captive, it
was slowly crushing their ship. Shackleton and his crew watched
as the Endurance creaked under the immense pressure of the ice.
By October of nineteen fifteen, after ten months stuck in

(04:05):
the ice, the ship was done for. The Endurance finally
sank beneath the frozen surface of the sea, leaving the
crew stranded on drifting ice floes with no means of
escape and not much shelter. Shackleton had his men set
up a more permanent camp on a large stretch of
floating ice, and he devised a plan to travel over

(04:27):
the ice to reach open water and hopefully be rescued.
They had to wait, though, for the ice to break up,
for months. They survived on seal and penguin meat and
the last of their supplies. Shackleton's leadership kept morale high
and everybody focused on survival. Now it's April of nineteen sixteen,

(04:52):
almost a year and a half after their initial wreck,
and the ice begins to break up. The crew took
to the three small lifeboats that they had pulled off
the ship before it sank and headed for Elephant Island,
a remote speck of land in the southern Ocean. They
faced freezing temperatures, huge waves, and storms, but after seven

(05:14):
days they finally reached the little island. But now they
had to get help, and that meant that Shackleton had
to take a small group of men and attempt another
journey across the sea eight hundred miles to an island
where they could find help. It was epic. For sixteen days,
they battled hurricane force winds, freezing temperatures, and monstrous waves.

(05:37):
Navigation was only a sextant and the stars. They made
it to the island, but they had to cross glaciers
in its uncharted, mountainous interior. They finally reached whaling stations
two days later on the other side of the island. Finally,
on May twentieth, nineteen sixteen, Shackleton and his men arrived,
with the explorer simply saying to the whale, my name

(06:01):
is Shackleton, Can you save my men. Three months later,
on August thirtieth, nineteen sixteen, Shackleton and the rescue team
returned to Elephant Island. The remaining crew were finally rescued. Amazingly,
every single member of the Endurance Expedition, all twenty eight,
had survived. What's fascinating is that even though Shackleton and

(06:24):
his crew never accomplished their goal to cross Antarctica from
sea to sea, they became iconic for their ability to
survive with pure Endurance, ironically the name of their lost ship.
It's a story that can inspire many of us dealing
with what feels like a hopeless situation to never give up,
to endure and get this in twenty twenty two, Though

(06:48):
one hundred forty four foot long wooden ship, the Endurance
was finally found more than a century later, almost completely intact,
close to ten thousand feet down under the ICC, its
name Endurance still crystal clear on the stern. Hope you're

(07:23):
enjoying The Backstory with Patty Steele. Follow or subscribe for
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a production of iHeartMedia Premiere Networks. The Elvis Durand Group

(07:47):
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our
writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
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Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't

(08:08):
know you needed to know.