Shackleton’s journey to the icy bottom of the Earth

Legendary expedition Ernest ShackletonAnglo-Irish explorer who led 27 people to Antarctica aboard the three-masted Barquentine schooner in 1914. Enduranceonly to see his ship sink and spend the next 500 days trying to survive and return to civilization sounds like something you read about in history books—or maybe a storybook. It’s a saga so far removed from our time, so rooted in a pre-technological world, that the idea that you can actually see it all seems miraculous.

And yet Shackleton, who had the talent of an early 20th century showman for advertising, took with him a director – photographer and cameraman Frank Hurley, who filmed the entire journey. Thus, even while Shackleton and his men were stuck at the bottom of the earth, trapped in the endless expanse of pack ice, their daily routine, their explorations, the entire ordeal frozen in time, was photographed and recorded.

The Titanic’s voyage took place in 1912, two years before Shackleton’s expedition, and imagine if the Titanic’s voyage had been captured on film, stored beneath the ocean, and then discovered. It would feel like you were witnessing something supernatural. The footage of Shackleton and his men is just as awe-inspiring. It moves like a time machine. I first encountered this footage—and, indeed, the entire saga—when I watched the stunning 2001 documentary Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. This film, in a way, created an aesthetic nautical allure.

“Endurance,” NatGeo’s new documentary about Shackleton’s journey, is very good, but its tone is less poetic, more scientific. The film crosses two journeys: Shackleton’s expedition (which he shows us in extraordinary detail) and the 2022 attempt by a team of explorers led by the venerable maritime archaeologist Mensoon Bound to retrace Shackleton’s journey and find the sunken corpse of his ship 3,000 meters below the sea. (They eventually found him.)

The wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985. After that, finding the wreck of the Endurance became the Holy Grail of underwater searches for historical treasures. Paralleling this quest with Shackleton’s Endurance quest creates a sort of glib equation (as if travel were remotely equivalent!). However, the film becomes a meditation on the meaning of two eras: one rooted in the mores of the 19th century – in faith and miracle, in man against the elements – and another controlled and protected by technology. One era seems religious, the other secular. I’d like to say that the cross-cutting added to the film’s suspense (it didn’t), but it’s nice to see the stories meet in the middle.

Endurance is a gritty documentary adventure film directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin and Natalie Hewitt. It is based on the letters and diaries of Shackleton and his men; at one point Shackleton wrote to his wife and said that he could hardly describe the excitement of exploring places and things that no man had ever seen before. This was the main attraction of Shackleton’s expedition, his fourth attempt to reach Antarctica. And he never achieved it. When he and his crew set out from South Georgia, the whalers warned them to delay the trip, saying conditions would be too harsh. But Shackleton, always desperate for funding, felt he could not turn back. Six months later, he and the crew found themselves in the icy Weddell Sea, and the ship soon sank.

The men we see in the old footage look oddly calm. They had supplies and lifeboats, each of which weighed a ton with equipment; the men had to drag these boats across the ice. Later, after they have washed up on Elephant Island and their tether is running low, Shackleton takes five men in a whaleboat to sail 800 treacherous ocean miles to South Georgia, a landmass they will then have to cross, climbing mountains and crossing icy chasms. . You feel the incredible extreme of it. (This is what faith looks like.)

The film makes use of enhancements such as coloring and sound effects, which I was against until I watched Peter Jackson’s revealing World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. Century-old silent footage in Endurance has been remastered with respect for its verisimilitude. However, I wish the film wasn’t mixed with reenactments. It’s better to let us imagine what we don’t see. But what we see in “Endurance” is simply stunning.