The ice takes Endurance, and Shackleton’s men step onto the floes with little more than what they can pull. This episode follows the crush of the ship, the first camps on moving ice, and the fight to stay together long enough to reach open water and finally land!
Today on part two, the pressure has been building for months all around Endurance. When it finally comes on October 24th, 1915, it moves through the pack like a shock wave. The stern is ripped away. Water pours in at 6:45 in the evening, and the men fire up the pumps, but the intakes are frozen. Worsley, Hudson and Greenstreet squirm down into the bowels of the ship through wet, slimy, blubber-soaked coal, pouring bucket after bucket of hot water onto the pipes until they break free.
Then it's fifteen minutes on the pumps, fifteen minutes on the cofferdam, all night long. Their muscles are so tight it takes ten minutes to loosen up enough to sleep, and just as they doze off, they're woken for the next shift.
They fought unceasingly for three days, and they lost.
Frank Wild puts his head into the pump room: "She's going, boys. I think it's time to get off."
What follows is five months on a drifting sheet of ice. Shackleton calls all hands together and tells them every ounce has to go, then reaches into his own parka, pulls out a gold cigarette case and a handful of gold coins, and throws them into the snow. He makes one exception. Hussey's twelve-pound banjo. Vital lifesaving music!
They try to march out. They fail. They try again at Christmas and fail worse, nine miles in five days, and that's where 56-year-old carpenter Harry McNish refuses to go another step, arguing his contract died with the ship.
Then Patience Camp. Four months of waiting, a sea leopard that hunts one of the men across the ice, and a decision Shackleton got wrong, one his own doctor was so unhappy about that he invented a secret code to write it down.
On April 9th, 1916, the ice finally opens. They launch three lifeboats into the Weddell Sea with no drinking water, and six days later, no sleep, thirst so bad they chew raw seal meat for the blood, they see the gray-brown cliffs of Elephant Island less than a mile away.
Solid ground, for the first time in 497 days.
Source material: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing, 1959.
Part 3 is next, camp life on Elephant Island, 800 miles of the worst ocean on earth in a 22-foot boat, and the crossing of South Georgia. And then we bring the boys home. I promise we will bring them home.
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Until next time, make it a beautiful day in the neighborhood, my friend.