The end came at last about 5 p.m. the pressure started again irresistibly and surely but slowly pressed her rudder over to port cracking & splitting the sternpost; they were gone. She was doomed. No ship built by human hands could have withstood the strain. I ordered all hands on to the floe and as the floe near us was cracking. We started to sledge all the gear across the pressure to what was seeming a safer place but I found that the safe place was bad – the floe splitting in the usual way.
In August 1914 Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty seven set sail for the Antarctic in an attempt to cross the continent on foot. Disaster struck when his ship, the Endurance, was trapped fast in the pack ice, just eighty five miles from their destination. The ship was crushed like matchwood by the pressure, leaving the crew stranded on an ice floe. With three life boats and provisions salvaged from the sinking ship, Shackleton led the men to safety. The ordeal lasted 20 months. Shackleton kept this diary during the months spent marooned on the ice.
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