Polaris was 144 metres long and weighed 300 tons. She had a hull made of oak and Norwegian pine and that was covered in greenheart, an incredibly tough and strong wood. She had a sail and was powered by a coal burning steam engine. In other words, she was the most up-to-date arctic exploring ship. Every corner of her 144 feet was tougher than leather.

Soon after the Polaris was built it was bought by Sir Ernest Shakleton, who (little did he know it) was about to make one of the most dangerous and famous expeditions ever, to the South Pole. On buying the ship, Shakleton renamed it the Endurance, after his family motto- Fortitude vicnimus- by endurance we conquer.

Shackleton was planning to take the ship, carrying 28 men including himself right to the place where Scott had just failed to reach. The journey would be perilous, as Shackleton made clear when he posted his advert for men to join the crew. It said-

"MEN WANTED: FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS. SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON."

As you can probably see, not very many people answered to the advert. Therefore the crew that Shackleton finally took on were a tough bunch of men.

The crew team.jpg

They set sail from London on August 1^st, 1914, on the day the 1^st world war started started. Shackleton offered the Endurance the and crew to fight three days later, but he and his men were excused from the fighting to make the trip, and so thankfully missed the war entirely.

On December the 5^th, they left a whaling station in South Georgia. This would be the last land that they would see for almost 500 days. The Endurance sailed proudly on for two days before they reached the arctic pack ice; by December the 30^th they had crossed the Arctic Circle.

Suddenly, the journey stopped, right in the middle of the arctic pack ice, only a few miles from land. The pack ice had been shifting around, and had caught the Endurance between a crack in the flows, holding it fast. The Endurance was left unmoving in this ice trap for ten long, winter months. The crew stayed on board for all this time, unable to shift the ship. Frank Hurley, the photographer on the ship, took some amazing pictures of the Endurance in the ice, lit up by lamps hidden in the ice around the ship. One of these pictures is at the beginning of this page.

There was a constant struggle to shift the ship. If Shackleton saw the tiniest crack in the ice, the entire crew would be out there, hacking away with pickaxes relentlessly, but nothing would make the Endurance move. Soon, the ship began to tip as the ice squeezed it on either side. Shackleton still tried, but in the end they had to abandon the Endurance. Supplies were packed and then put into the three lifeboats, The James Caird, The Stancomb Wills and The Dudley Docker, named after the providers of the financial backing for the expedition. These boats had been fitted with runners to go over the thick ice. The crew had to pull these boats themselves and that was incredibly hard work, due to the consistent bumps and dips. They set up camp about a mile away, where it was still possible to see the ship. A few of the crew made one more excursion back, when the ship was half under water. Frank Hurley had left his precious photographs behind and actually dived into the freezing Arctic sea to retrieve them, for as he said (somewhere along these lines), "Without these pictures, we are nothing but a bunch of schoolgirls got lost on a nature trip."

It was October the 27^th when The Endurance finally yielded to the cruel ice. She slipped between it, crushed, and allowed it to close over the top of her. All that was left was the three lifeboats.

Shackleton, however, did not despair. He guided the lifeboats over the ice and back to the sea, without losing one member of his crew. At that stage, the Huskies brought on the expedition could only be left behind, and they had no supplies. The only choice was to shoot them and eat them.

The three lifeboats finally landed on Elephant Island, unable to go on. They could not get to land as they had only landed in a beach in a crag. Two of the life boats- The Stancomb Wills and The Dudley Docker – were made into a hut, and the James Caird sailed on, containing Shackleton and a few other men, to get help. They reached a beach, and still had to climb over the mountains to a whaling station on the other side. These mountains had never been climbed before, and it was a hard slog, but they got there in the end. Shackleton sailed back to collect the rest of the men, and went safely back to England, where they were all thought dead. Shackleton brought back every single man from his crew of 28- an amazing achievement.

Even though the endurance never made it to the South Pole, her journey is still known as one of the most amazing and brave expeditions ever made.