Follow Shackleton's expedition day by day: from South Georgia into the pack ice, ten months of drift, the loss of the ship, five months camped on the floes, and the boat journeys that saved every man.
This is a first prototype. The quotations with each key moment come from South (1919), Shackleton's own account, which is in the public domain (Project Gutenberg #5199). Some of those passages are diary entries by other members of the expedition that Shackleton quotes.
The crew's diary entries (“From the crew's diaries”) are quoted from Alfred Lansing's Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage (1959), and each one names the chapter it's from. The diarists' words, and Lansing's book, may still be in copyright; they're included here for a non-commercial history of the expedition. If you hold the rights to any of them and would like an entry removed, get in touch.
Solid line: noon positions given in South, from Worsley's observations, between December 1914 and the abandonment of the ship on 27 October 1915. One stretch in August–September 1915 is dotted because South only gives an approximate position there.
Dotted line: reconstructed. South rarely gives coordinates after the ship was lost, so the drift of the camps, the boat journey and the James Caird's course are estimated from the distances and landmarks in the text, such as “84 miles north in six days” or “level with Paulet Island but sixty miles to the east”. The authoritative records are Worsley's logbooks at Canterbury Museum (NZ) and the 1919 list of noon positions at the Scott Polar Research Institute (MS 1241).
The wreck of the Endurance was found on 5 March 2022 by the Endurance22 expedition, 3,008 m down and about 4 nautical miles from Worsley's recorded sinking position.
No one mapped the pack in 1915. The ice shown is the typical modern monthly extent: the median ice edge for each month over 1981–2010, from the NSIDC Sea Ice Index (G02135, v4.0), blended day by day. Where South records the ship or the camps inside the pack, the edge is pushed out to include them. Around Elephant Island it follows what South describes: open sea on the final run to the island (13–15 April 1916), a line of pack five miles offshore a week later, pack round the island through the winter that turned back the relief ships, and a lane for the Yelcho on 30 August. The Weddell Sea was probably icier in 1915–16 than the modern median.
The cylinder recording is My South Polar Expedition (Edison Amberol 473), digitised by the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive and hosted on Wikimedia Commons. “Read aloud” plays recordings of the quotations and diary entries, read by a synthetic voice made with ElevenLabs. It isn't Shackleton's voice, or any of the diarists': it was designed to suit an English polar explorer of the time.
Photographs are mostly by Frank Hurley, the expedition photographer, via Wikimedia Commons. Each one links to its source page and licence.
Coastlines from Natural Earth (via world-atlas), shown in a stereographic projection centred on the Weddell Sea. Built with D3.
Made by Benedict Noel.