Shackleton's Boat Journey

Frank Worsley's remains the classic account of this extraordinary story. The journey began on 1 August 1914 in London and the next the world knew was on 20 May 1916, when three ragged men staggered into a whaling station at Grytviken on South Georgia.

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- the expedition had been trapped for months in the ice, watched their ship being slowly crushed, walked in appalling conditions to the edge of the ice sheet and in three small boats sailed to Elephant Island ...From Elephant Island one of the boats was adapted in the desperate gamble of reaching South Georgia. Shackleton and his colleagues navigated by dead reckoning across the stormy Atlantic ocean and they were the first human beings to walk across South Georgia. After three attempts their crew was rescued from Elephant Island. Not a man was lost. Frank Worsley's account of the Shackleton Boat Journey remains the classic account of this extraordinary story. The journey had begun on 1 August 1914 in London and the next the world knew of Shackleton was on 20 May 1916, when three filthy ragged men staggered into the whaling station at Grytviken on South Georgia. In the opening months of the war the fate of Shackleton alternated with war news in the newspapers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even remarked in a speech regarding the British navy: 'We can pass the eight Dreadnoughts, if we are sure of the eight Shackletons.'
On Shackleton's death Frank Worsley remarked: We had passed together through many valleys of shadow, and each time that we had won through, the bonds which united us had been strengthened. I knew that I should never look upon his like again. Surely there is no end with such a man as Shackleton: something of his spirit must still live on with us. Worsley was close to Shackleton through the whole expedition. He died in New Zealand.