Frank Hurley's pictures would be remarkable--absolutely first-rate photo-journalism--if they had been made last week. In fact, they were shot from 1914 through 1916, most of them after a disastrous shipwreck, by a cameraman who had no reasonable expectation of survival. Many of the images, made on glass plates, then spent several months sealed in lead boxes, stored in an ice chest, under freezing water, in the crushed wooden hull of a slowly sinking ship.
The ship was the Endurance, a small, tight, Norwegian-built three-master that was intended to take Sir Ernest Shackleton and a small crew of seamen and scientist, 27 men in all, to the southernmost shore of Antarctica's Weddell Sea. From that point Shackleton proposed to force a passage by dogsled across the continent. The trek was intended to surpass the achievement of Shackleton's great rival, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who had reached the South Pole early in 1912 (narrowly preceded by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen) but had died with his four companions on the march back.
As writer Caroline Alexander makes clear in her forceful and well-researched narrative The Endurance (Knopf; 212 pages; $29.95), adventuring was even then a thoroughly commercial proposition. Scott's last journal, completed as he lay in a tent dying of cold and hunger, caught the world's imagination, and a filmed tribute drew crowds. Shackleton, a onetime British merchant-navy officer who had trekked to within 100 miles of the South Pole in 1908, formed a syndicate before his 1914 voyage to capitalize on movie and still photography. Frank Hurley, a self-assured and gifted Australian photographer who knew the Antarctic, was hired to make the images, most of which have never before been published.
What might have happened is a fascinating guess. It seems doubtful that even such sturdy characters as Shackleton and his crew could have made a transpolar crossing. The terrain was unknown and unforgiving, no one on board knew much about dogsledding, and the half-trained dogs were sick because worm medicine had been left behind.
What did happen became legend. The Endurance was caught in drifting pack ice during the coldest season in memory and, after weeks of trying to follow open-water leads, was frozen in. And there the ship stayed. Shackleton and his men were prepared to winter over, and they did, still fairly confident, killing penguins to stretch out their stores of food. Hurley climbed the yardarms to take photos, and at one point--amazingly, given the equipment he had to work with--lighted the frost-coated ship with 20 synchronized flashes for a dramatic night shot.