REVIEW

Extraordinary
‘Endurance’
photographs tell tale

By Greg Ambrose
Special to the Star-Bulletin

At the turn of the century as the Age of Adventure was slowly winding down, the world's explorers had worked themselves into a panic, convinced all the great adventures were over.

So on the eve of World War I, Sir Arthur Shackleton set off from England on a doozy of a quest: to become the first person to cross Antarctica on dog sled.

The grand adventure quickly became the world's most inspirational disaster, as the explorer's ship, the Endurance, became frozen in the ice pack that surrounds the continent and was slowly crushed to pieces, leaving Shackleton and his crew to endure unimaginable privations.

Many books have been written about Shackleton and his crew's resourcefulness and bravery in enduring the brutal Antarctic winter (incredibly, they all survived), and this one breaks no ground in its presentation of the tale.

But author Caroline Alexander has a trump card that beats any other tome about Shackleton: astounding pictures by Frank Hurley, the expedition's Australian photographer. Hurley exerted superhuman effort to transport his bulky Graflex cameras, tripods and glass plate negatives as the crew abandoned ship, camped on ice floes, hauled their gear across a nightmarish Antarctic terrain and sailed in small, open boats through tempestuous seas.

The crew's dire circumstances finally caused Hurley to part with his photographic equipment, but he protected the most precious glass plates, and caught additional emotional images on Kodak film with a pocket camera.

Hurley's haunting photos and Alexander's well-crafted and meticulously researched prose present a fresh new perspective on one of the world's most heroic triumphs of humans over unimaginably hostile conditions.

Review The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition: By: Caroline Alexander; Alfred A. Knopf 213 pages; hardcover $29.95

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