20/05/2026
📍 South Georgia, 1916
On this day in 1916, the whalers of Stromness saw three ghostly figures emerge from the South Georgian wilderness, filthy, frostbitten and half-dead. They were Sir Ernest Shackleton, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean, presumed lost for months.
Their journey was unprecedented: 800 miles across the world’s most brutal seas in a 22-foot lifeboat, followed by a crossing of South Georgia’s unmapped, glaciated mountains with only 50 feet of rope, a carpenter’s adze and extraordinary willpower.
The final descent was as desperate as the rest:
“We’ll slide,” Shackleton said. “It’s a devil of a risk. But we’ve got to take it.”
Tied together, the three men tobogganed into darkness towards Fortuna Bay and miraculously survived – a descent so notorious we borrowed its name for our first alpine ski suit. After 36 hours without sleep or shelter, they reached Stromness, unrecognisable.
“Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Shackleton,” came the reply. “We have lost our ship and come over the island.”
This was the turning point in the Endurance ordeal. Every man would survive. Not one life lost.
As Shackleton later reflected:
“We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had ‘suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.’ We had seen God in his splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of men.”
Photographs from slide 2 onwards by , who last year, alongside and the team from , attempted to retrace Shackleton’s route through South Georgia.
Despite modern equipment and mapping technology, the team could not complete the full traverse, returning to Fortuna Bay by ship to make the descent from the Stromness side. With the luxury of time to plan their journey were greated with beautiful weather conditions compared to the bleak icy darkness Shackleton and his men endured.
