TIME OUT

Shackleton’s Boat Journey – Frank Worsley

Shackleton’s Boat Journey charts the 1916 voyage that Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men undertook in the Antarctic ice after their ship, , became embayed in ice and was later crushed. With the ship gone, Shackleton and his 28-man crew took to three lifeboats between 22ft and 28ft long which they rowed and sailed through frigid, ice-strewn waters to Elephant Island, a desolate, uninhabited outpost in the Southern Ocean. Having the largest and most seaworthy boat, a further 715 nautical miles across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia. Having achieved this near-impossible feat and landed on the uninhabited western side of the island, aware that the was not fit to sail further, Shackleton decided that he, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean should traverse the mountainous interior of South Georgia in order to reach the whaling station and civilisation on the other side of the island. After 36 hours’ continuous tramping, the trio made it to the whaling station of Stromness. It then took three attempts to rescue the men stranded on Elephant Island, but this was eventually achieved and, remarkably, there were no casualties.