So we have Lansing to largely thank for Shackleton's rehabilitation. Not a single member of either party was lost.

Three attempts and three and a half months later, Shackleton returned to Elephant Island to pick up the remaining men. The five men then made the first crossing of the island to reach the whaling station at Stromness. Once he realised there was no chance of rescue, he and four crew mates sailed a further 600 miles across the southern ocean to South Georgia where they were shipwrecked. With his boat crushed, he led his men across the pack-ice, sailed them in open boats to Elephant Island. Not only was he a far better explorer than Scott, both in terms of his technical and man management capabilities, but the story of the Transantarctic expedition read like an epic out of a Boys Own annual. He achieved a certain amount of acclaim when South, his own account of the Expedition, was published, but his legend seemed to die with him when he suffered a fatal heart attack on another trip south in 1922. If Scott's deification was almost instantaneous, Shackleton's descent into obscurity was more of a slow fade than a sudden death. Britain's polar history had been rewritten with Shackleton airbrushed out and Captain Scott taking centre stage as the archetypal English hero who died on the Great Barrier on his long haul back from the South Pole. When Alfred Lansing's Endurance was first published in 1959, few people in this country-or anywhere else for that matter-had heard of Shackleton or the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition of 1914. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age. Their survival, and the survival of the men they left behind, depended on their small lifeboat successfully finding the island of South Georgia,a tiny dot of land in a vast and hostile ocean. With no options left, Shackleton and a skeleton crew attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization. For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed between two ice floes.

Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot.

Endurance by alfred lansing