ePub Warning to the West by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in History

Description

In August 1914; days before the outbreak of the First World War; the renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven set sail for the South Atlantic in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize in the history of exploration: the first crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent. Weaving a treacherous path through the freezing Weddell Sea; they had come within eighty-five miles of their destination when their ship; Endurance; was trapped fast in the ice pack. Soon the ship was crushed like matchwood; leaving the crew stranded on the floes. Their ordeal would last for twenty months; and they would make two near-fatal attempts to escape by open boat before their final rescue.Drawing upon previously unavailable sources; Caroline Alexander gives us a riveting account of Shackleton's expedition--one of history's greatest epics of survival. And she presents the astonishing work of Frank Hurley; the Australian photographer whose visual record of the adventure has never before been published comprehensively. Together; text and image re-create the terrible beauty of Antarctica; the awful destruction of the ship; and the crew's heroic daily struggle to stay alive; a miracle achieved largely through Shackleton's inspiring leadership. The survival of Hurley's remarkable images is scarcely less miraculous: The original glass plate negatives; from which most of the book's illustrations are superbly reproduced; were stored in hermetically sealed cannisters that survived months on the ice floes; a week in an open boat on the polar seas; and several more months buried in the snows of a rocky outcrop called Elephant Island. Finally Hurley was forced to abandon his professional equipment; he captured some of the most unforgettable images of the struggle with a pocket camera and three rolls of Kodak film.Published in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural History's landmark exhibition on Shackleton's journey; The Endurance thrillingly recounts one of the last great adventures in the Heroic Age of exploration--perhaps the greatest of them all.