Frozen In Time

By John Skow

Frank Hurley's pictures would be remarkable--absolutely first-rate photo-journalism--if they had been made last week. In fact, they were shot from 1914 through 1916, most of them after a disastrous shipwreck, by a cameraman who had no reasonable expectation of survival. Many of the images, made on glass plates, then spent several months sealed in lead boxes, stored in an ice chest, under freezing water, in the crushed wooden hull of a slowly sinking ship.

The ship was the Endurance, a small, tight, Norwegian-built three-master that was intended to take Sir Ernest Shackleton and a small crew of seamen and scientist, 27 men in all, to the southernmost shore of Antarctica's Weddell Sea. From that point Shackleton proposed to force a passage by dogsled across the continent. The trek was intended to surpass the achievement of Shackleton's great rival, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who had reached the South Pole early in 1912 (narrowly preceded by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen) but had died with his four companions on the march back.

As writer Caroline Alexander makes clear in her forceful and well-researched narrative The Endurance (Knopf; 212 pages; $29.95), adventuring was even then a thoroughly commercial proposition. Scott's last journal, completed as he lay in a tent dying of cold and hunger, caught the world's imagination, and a filmed tribute drew crowds. Shackleton, a onetime British merchant-navy officer who had trekked to within 100 miles of the South Pole in 1908, formed a syndicate before his 1914 voyage to capitalize on movie and still photography. Frank Hurley, a self-assured and gifted Australian photographer who knew the Antarctic, was hired to make the images, most of which have never before been published.

What might have happened is a fascinating guess. It seems doubtful that even such sturdy characters as Shackleton and his crew could have made a transpolar crossing. The terrain was unknown and unforgiving, no one on board knew much about dogsledding, and the half-trained dogs were sick because worm medicine had been left behind.

What did happen became legend. The Endurance was caught in drifting pack ice during the coldest season in memory and, after weeks of trying to follow open-water leads, was frozen in. And there the ship stayed. Shackleton and his men were prepared to winter over, and they did, still fairly confident, killing penguins to stretch out their stores of food. Hurley climbed the yardarms to take photos, and at one point--amazingly, given the equipment he had to work with--lighted the frost-coated ship with 20 synchronized flashes for a dramatic night shot.

But warmer weather in the next Antarctic spring did not free the Endurance. Ice crushed the reinforced stern. The vessel heeled at a grotesque angle. Hurley photographed the canted wreckage and, as the crew unloaded what provisions remained, as well as three boats, he stripped to the waist, hacked through the walls of the ice chest, now under 4 ft. of mushy ice, and salvaged the waterproof tin boxes that held his finished glass plates. Then he and Shackleton (in what a present-day photographer wryly calls "one of history's great editing jobs") opened the boxes, examined the negatives, dumped some 400 because weight would be crucial in any rescue, and kept 120, the most striking of which illustrate the present astonishing book. To record the rest of the journey, Hurley kept a pocket Kodak and three rolls of film.

The saga that followed defined heroism. The Endurance sank on Nov. 21, 1915, after 10 months locked in the ice. Its people endured, largely because Shackleton manufactured an unending supply of energy and optimism. He had a knack for spotting worn psychological insulation before it began to spark, taking pains to consult Hurley, who was smart and tough but a prima donna, and shifting a fragile, much teased crewman to his own tent. The cossetting worked. On short rations, eating penguins and the last of the dogs, the officers and men dragged the ship's three boats, loaded with gear, northward on thin, drifting ice. When the ice cracked, the boats were, for better or worse, launched. Seven numbing, soaking days later they landed on an uninhabited expanse of rock called Elephant Island.

By now the men were exhausted, frostbitten and all but defeated. One diary entry mentions that "dejected men were dragged from their bags and set to work." But no rescue could be expected here, and within a few days Shackleton and five of his strongest men set out again in the James Caird, a two-masted, 22-ft. whaler.

The new objective was a whaling station on South Georgia Island, 800 miles to the northeast. Numbed by sleet, wave-soaked by 10 days of gales and plagued by thirst, they accomplished what is now regarded as one of the most heroic small-boat voyages ever made and beached perilously 16 days later on a rocky, lee shore. Three wet, bone-tired, frostbitten men--Shackleton and two others--then climbed snow-blown mountains for three days and descended to the whaling station. There they asked how the Great War had ended, and were told it still raged.

No doubt because of the war, the subsequent rescue of the entire crew, without a single death, drew only muted exclamation. That has since changed. Alexander's expert chronicle is one of several newly published books to tell the tale, including a reissue of Shackleton's account, South. A movie is in the works, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, who made Das Boot. And a six-month exhibition that features Hurley's stunning photos begins next April at New York City's American Museum of Natural History.