You seriously mean to tell me that the ship is doomed? asked Frank Worsley, commander of the Endurance, stuck impassably in Antarctic ice packs. What the ice gets, replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition’s unflappable leader, the ice keeps. It did not, however, get the ship’s twenty-five crew members, all of whom survived an eight-hundred-mile voyage across sea, land, and ice to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island.

First published in 1931, Endurance tells the full story of that doomed 1914-16 expedition and incredible rescue, as well as relating Worsley’s further adventures fighting U-boats in the Great War, sailing the equally treacherous waters of the Arctic, and making one final (and successful) assault on the South Pole with Shackleton. It is a tale of unrelenting high adventure and a tribute to one of the most inspiring and courageous leaders of men in the history of exploration.