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But warmer weather in the next Antarctic spring did not free the Endurance. Ice crushed the reinforced stern. The vessel heeled at a grotesque angle. Hurley photographed the canted wreckage and, as the crew unloaded what provisions remained, as well as three boats, he stripped to the waist, hacked through the walls of the ice chest, now under 4 ft. of mushy ice, and salvaged the waterproof tin boxes that held his finished glass plates. Then he and Shackleton (in what a present-day photographer wryly calls "one of history's great editing jobs") opened the boxes, examined the negatives, dumped some 400 because weight would be crucial in any rescue, and kept 120, the most striking of which illustrate the present astonishing book. To record the rest of the journey, Hurley kept a pocket Kodak and three rolls of film.
The saga that followed defined heroism. The Endurance sank on Nov. 21, 1915, after 10 months locked in the ice. Its people endured, largely because Shackleton manufactured an unending supply of energy and optimism. He had a knack for spotting worn psychological insulation before it began to spark, taking pains to consult Hurley, who was smart and tough but a prima donna, and shifting a fragile, much teased crewman to his own tent. The cossetting worked. On short rations, eating penguins and the last of the dogs, the officers and men dragged the ship's three boats, loaded with gear, northward on thin, drifting ice. When the ice cracked, the boats were, for better or worse, launched. Seven numbing, soaking days later they landed on an uninhabited expanse of rock called Elephant Island.
By now the men were exhausted, frostbitten and all but defeated. One diary entry mentions that "dejected men were dragged from their bags and set to work." But no rescue could be expected here, and within a few days Shackleton and five of his strongest men set out again in the James Caird, a two-masted, 22-ft. whaler.
The new objective was a whaling station on South Georgia Island, 800 miles to the northeast. Numbed by sleet, wave-soaked by 10 days of gales and plagued by thirst, they accomplished what is now regarded as one of the most heroic small-boat voyages ever made and beached perilously 16 days later on a rocky, lee shore. Three wet, bone-tired, frostbitten men--Shackleton and two others--then climbed snow-blown mountains for three days and descended to the whaling station. There they asked how the Great War had ended, and were told it still raged.
No doubt because of the war, the subsequent rescue of the entire crew, without a single death, drew only muted exclamation. That has since changed. Alexander's expert chronicle is one of several newly published books to tell the tale, including a reissue of Shackleton's account, South. A movie is in the works, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, who made Das Boot. And a six-month exhibition that features Hurley's stunning photos begins next April at New York City's American Museum of Natural History.