In December 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven men set sail from South Georgia for the South Pole aboard the Endurance, the object of their expedition to cross Antarctica overland. A month later the ship was beset in the ice of the Weddell Sea, just outside the Antarctic Circle. Temperatures dropped to 35 degrees Celsius below zero. Ice-moored, the Endurance drifted northwest for ten months before it was finally crushed. The ordeal, however, had barely begun. Now illustrated with expedition photographer Frank Hurley's breathtaking images of the crew, the wildlife, the stark beauty of the land and terrors of the sea at every stage of this grueling adventure, Alfred Lansing's already compelling narrative assumes even more staggering dramatic power in its depiction of the heroic endurance of Shackleton and his twenty-seven indefatigably courageous men.