The Endurance left South Georgia for Antarctica on 5 December 1914. Onboard were 27 crew members plus a stowaway, 69 dogs and one cat. Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition leader, was aiming to establish a base on Antarctica’s Weddell Sea coast and then keep going to the Ross Sea on the other side of the continent.
Within two days, the ship encountered the barrier of thick sea ice around the Antarctic continent. For several weeks, the Endurance made painstaking progress, but in mid-January a gale pushed the ice floes hard against one another and the ship was stuck – “frozen like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar”, according to a crew member, Thomas Orde-Lees.
