I am an artist by training and an explorer by circumstance, and what I have been trying to do for the three years since I returned from the ice is find a way to paint what I saw down there. I have not managed it. The light on the Antarctic ice — the quality of illumination in a place where the sun circles the horizon for months without setting, where the ice reflects a sky that is itself reflecting something back from the ice — is not a light I have encountered in any studio or on any coast of England. I keep trying. I keep failing. Possibly the effort is the point.
We left London in August 1914, the day war was declared. Shackleton offered the ship and the men to the Admiralty; Churchill sent back a one-word telegram: "Proceed." So we proceeded, south, while Europe began its own destruction behind us.
The Beset
The Endurance entered the Weddell Sea ice in December 1914. By January 19, 1915, she was beset — held fast in pack ice that had closed around her hull with enough pressure to lift her stern three feet. She would not move freely again.
What I want you to understand about the beset is how gradually it became a fact. At first we thought the ice would loosen with the tide or the wind. It did not. Then we thought it would loosen in a few days. It did not. Then a week. Then we measured our situation in months and understood that we would winter in the ice, that the ship would be our home until the ice chose to release her.
We made ourselves a life in the ship. We had dogs — sixty-nine of them, for the overland crossing that would now not happen — and we built kennels on the ice and called the arrangement "Dogloos." We played football on the ice with the dogs watching. We performed theatrical shows, in which I painted the sets. Shackleton had a gift — I have never encountered it to the same degree in another person — for maintaining the morale of 27 men in an impossible situation. He knew who needed to be given a task, and who needed to be given a rest, and who needed to be told, in private, that it was alright to be afraid.
The Killing of the Dogs
In October 1915, the ice began to move. Not to release us — to crush us.
The pressure on the hull increased over several weeks until the beams began to crack. On October 27th, Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship. We took the lifeboats and the supplies onto the ice. On November 21st, the Endurance went under, stern first, with the masts still standing. I watched her go. I had lived in her for fifteen months.
We camped on the ice through the Antarctic summer, moving camp when floes fractured beneath us, waiting for the drift to carry us toward land. In April 1916 — sixteen months after the beset — the ice broke up enough for us to launch the boats. I will not describe the five days in open boats in the Drake Passage except to say that I have never been so cold or so afraid, and that beside me in the boat was a man named Timothy McCarthy who sang Irish songs when the waves broke over us, and that this helped more than I can explain.
Elephant Island
We landed on Elephant Island on April 15, 1916. It was the first land beneath our feet in 497 days. The men who had not yet lost the capacity for demonstrative emotion wept. Others stood and looked at the rocks and the tussock grass with expressions that I found impossible to paint afterward — not joy exactly, because we were still 800 miles from the nearest human settlement on South Georgia, and our situation was still completely desperate — but something like recognition. Land is what we were made for. Even this land.
Shackleton took five men — the strongest, the most experienced sailors — in the 22-foot James Caird and made for South Georgia. The remaining twenty-two of us turned two of the lifeboats upside down and built a shelter and settled in to wait. We did not know how long we would wait. We did not know if the James Caird would reach South Georgia. We did not discuss these things.
I continued to paint.
The Wait
We waited on Elephant Island for 105 days. The island offered certain things: solid ground, elephant seals and penguins for food, some shelter from the worst winds. It offered nothing in the way of rescue. No ship had ever come to Elephant Island before. No ship had any reason to come. We were there because it was the only land for hundreds of miles in any direction, and we were invisible on it.
I will not describe the 105 days in detail because the details become repetitive. Cold, and then colder. Food that required imagination to eat. The particular monotony of extreme conditions, which is not the monotony of boredom but the monotony of endurance — of doing the same hard things each day because the alternative is not to do them, which is not an option.
On August 30, 1916, at seven in the evening, a ship appeared through the pack ice. We had seen ships in the distance three times before — Shackleton's previous rescue attempts, turned back by ice — and had watched them disappear with a particular quality of silence. This ship did not disappear. It came closer. We could see a small figure on the bow, and even from the distance we could see that it was Shackleton.
All twenty-two of us were still alive. I want you to mark that. In one of the most hostile environments on earth, in conditions that would have killed most expeditions, twenty-two men had survived 105 days of waiting through the force of Shackleton's promise, made when he left, that he would come back. He came back.
I still cannot paint the Antarctic light. I have not stopped trying.
Narrator's note: George Marston was a real person — the expedition's artist — though this account is fictionalized. The dates, survival details, and all events described are documented in Frank Worsley's Endurance (1931), Alfred Lansing's Endurance (1959), and Caroline Alexander's The Endurance (1998).