Original subtitles

This is the original documentary film record of Sir Ernest Shackleton's "glorious failure",

his planned expedition to cross the Antarctic continent

and the unparalleled battle for survival that he and his men made

when their ship became trapped in the polar ice.

It was Shackleton's third attempt to Antarctica

and he was journeying in the wake of Roald Amundsen's attainment of the South Pole

and Captain Scott's tragic failure to return from the bottom of the world.

Anxious for glory, Shackleton planned to cross Antarctica

from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, via the South Pole.

As Shackleton and his men on their ship, the Endurance, prepared to leave British waters

on August 4th 1914,

Britain declared war on Germany.

Shackleton was presented with an agonising dilemma

and he and his men all offered their services to the military effort,

but were given the one-word instruction from the Admiralty: Proceed.

The scenes here of Shackleton and key crew members,

were taken on their return to Britain in 1916

and it was necessary that they be seen to be in uniform

to show that they too were doing their bit for the British Empire after two years on the ice.

When they left Britain, they feared that they would miss all the action.

Like everyone else at that time, they believed fighting would be over by Christmas 1914.

On their return, they would find the war had another two years to run.

When they sailed out from Buenos Aires in Argentina on October 27th,

they would have no further news of the terrible war that overturned civilisation

and destroyed their comfortable Edwardian world until May of 1916.

By then, the Edwardian world that they took with them

and which had bred this strange thirst for polar glory,

in what has become known as the classic age of polar exploration,

would be destroyed forever.

Shackleton described their adventures as "The White Warfare of the South".

Joining the crew of the Endurance at Buenos Aires,

was the Australian photographer, Frank Hurley.

Hurley was a tough, resourceful and fearless adventurer,

who'd been on one Antarctic expedition with the Australian explorer, Douglas Mawson.

It was Hurley's films and photographs of that expedition, when shown in Britain,

that had attracted Shackleton to him.

A cinematographer was now becoming an important part of many expedition plans,

both for the novelty of the motion-picture record

and more importantly, because the revenue from the films

would greatly alleviate expedition expenses.

Frank Hurley's film of the Transantarctic Expedition

would indeed prove to be a financial life-saver for Shackleton:

Never one of the most financially wise of explorers.

Frank Hurley was on a photographic expedition in north Australia,

when an Aborigine messenger boy brought a telegram to him carried in a cleft stick.

Shackleton, the great explorer,

had appointed him official photographer to the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition.

If he was agreeable to this, he should be in Buenos Aires by October 10th.

Hurley immediately abandoned his expedition

and crossed half the globe to join Shackleton, a man he had never met,

reaching Buenos Aires a few days before him.

The Endurance sailed out from Buenos Aires with 28 crew,

including one stowaway, Perce Blackborow,

a 19-year-old Welshman who had unsuccessfully tried to join the ship

officially at Buenos Aires.

And was found when they were one day's sail out.

Shackleton harangued the hapless, seasick young man for some while on his discovery,

told him that the stowaway would be the first to be eaten when they got hungry

and then let him stay.

They stopped off first on the island of South Georgia for one month.

This delay was due to reports of unusually severe ice conditions in Antarctica that year.

The first ominous signs of the ship's fate were there to be read,

but on December 7th, they sailed out once more.

With them were 69 Canadian sledge dogs.

They had been picked up by the Endurance at Buenos Aires

and were meant to haul the sledges across Antarctica,

though one of the many handicaps affecting the expedition

was the lack of any experienced dog handler among the crew.

Another severe oversight was leaving behind a store of worm pills.

Several of the dogs were to die during a small epidemic of worm infestation.

Nevertheless, they were popular among the crew

and proved valuable companions during the more tedious stretches of the expedition.

Just as important, they were photogenic and likely to be popular with cinema audiences

and Frank Hurley made sure that he covered their presence extensively.

Anthropomorphic scenes of animal life were essential to the film's commercial success.

Several crew members are seen in these opening scenes of the expedition.

James Mcllroy, on the left, was one of two surgeons on the Endurance

and was an experienced and well-travelled practitioner,

having been in the Malay States prior to taking his chance with Shackleton.

The Glaswegian, James Wordie, on the right, was the expedition's geologist,

one of the scientific staff whose presence and whose discoveries

helped justify the adventure and attract funds,

but in whose work Shackleton had little genuine interest.

Frank Hurley observed,

with whom he had previously travelled,

that whereas for Mawson, the exploration was a necessary excuse for the science,

for Shackleton, the science provided the excuse for the exploration.

Alexander Macklin, seen carrying a puppy, to the intense interest of the other dogs,

was another Scot, who had spent his childhood in the Scilly Isles

and was well-accustomed to travel in small boats.

He was chief surgeon on the Endurance.

Macklin administers medicine to one of the dogs with the assistance of Reginald James,

the Cambridge-educated physicist to the expedition.

James had been surprised, in his interview with Shackleton before gaining the post,

to have been asked if he could sing,

with his abilities as a physicist taken as read.

Indeed, James's conviviality was to prove a great boon in the darker days ahead.

In these scenes, a moody Shackleton paces around in the background

and at one point even aims a kick at one of the dogs.

Frank Wild was Shackleton's second-in-command

and had been with Shackleton on two previous Antarctic expeditions,

including being one of the parties which achieved the furthest distance south in 1909,

97 miles from the Pole,

before a lack of sufficient provision to cover their final journey to the Pole and return,

forced Shackleton to make the courageous but essential decision to turn back.

Greatly impressed by the demonstration of Shackleton's leadership qualities

on that expedition,

a previously sceptical Wild was now his loyalest supporter.

Sir Ernest Shackleton had been knighted after his furthest-south achievement.

He was an Anglo-Irishman, born in County Kildare in 1874.

He joined the merchant navy at 16 and had travelled widely with the merchant service

before he volunteered for greater adventure,

joining the 1901 Discovery expedition to the Antarctic,

which was led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott.

This expedition ushered in the heroic age of polar exploration

and its evident and patriotic purpose

was to be the first to the South Pole and to claim it for the British Empire.

Scott chose Shackleton and Dr Edward Wilson for the final assault on the Pole.

The attempt failed ignominiously

and Shackleton suffered grievously from scurvy.

He and Scott also discovered a mutual antipathy

that deepened as each mounted separate expeditions in the race for the Pole.

Shackleton was leader for the next expedition south,

that of the Nimrod in 1907 to 1909,

when he and three companions, including Frank Wild,

came within 97 miles of the pole.

He returned to Britain to find himself a national hero.

However, he had then to pay off the considerable debts of the expedition,

which took up much of his time, as he lectured widely.

Meanwhile, his great rival, Scott, mounted his own expedition in 1911,

in what became a race for the pole with the Norwegian Roald Amundsen.

Amundsen, using skis and dog teams with an ease and a professionalism

that totally eluded the British explorers,

reached the pole on the 14th December 1911.

Scott and four men arrived second on January 17th 1912.

All five died on the return journey.

But what Scott lacked in basic exploration skills,

he made up for, at least as far as posterity was concerned, in his literary gift.

His poignant and deftly expressed final words in his diaries,

when these became known to the world in 1913,

set in motion a powerful myth.

Scott was a hero and had died a hero's death.

Shackleton had to try and go one better than either Amundsen or Scott.

Of course he could not,

and the expedition he finally was able to finance with rich backers, promises

and the sale of the story, photographic and the cinematographic rights,

was a crossing of the Antarctic continent via the South Pole.

He boldly promoted the adventure as being, from the sentimental point of view,

the last great polar journey that can be made.

America had captured the North Pole and Norway the South,

now Britain must try to encompass an entire continent.

The plan was that the main Endurance party, led by Shackleton,

would journey from the Weddell Sea towards the Pole.

Meanwhile, a second party, in Mawson's old ship, the Aurora,

would base itself on the other side of the continent at Cape Royds in the Ross Sea

and would lay depots progressively inland

which would be used by Shackleton's party at points to pass the Pole.

This second party was captained by Aeneas Mackintosh,

and does not feature in Frank Hurley's film.

It is generally considered that Shackleton's plan was wildly overambitious

and would very probably have resulted in disaster for all concerned.

As it was, the Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea parties were destined never to meet

and indeed Shackleton was destined never even to make land.

The last great polar journey was instead to become

perhaps the greatest escape story in the history of exploration.

Only two days out of South Georgia,

the Endurance first encountered the pack ice at the edge of the Weddell Sea.

As they had been warned on South Georgia,

they were now entering upon an abnormally cold season

and ice was soon thick about them.

Frank Worsley, commander of the Endurance,

guided the ship through the floes, avoiding the main pack ice so far as he could,

often using the Endurance as a battering ram.

It was at this time that Frank Hurley captured some of the most striking images of his film,

clambering precariously onto the end of the jib boom

to film the prow of the ship breaking through the ice.

Sometimes moving freely,

sometimes driving with juddering force into the ice and forming cracks

through which she then steamed.

It is unclear if it is Hurley that the film shows clambering back along the jib boom,

for that begs the question, who is taking the film of him?

It would be interesting to know if Hurley was conscious of the striking crucifix imagery

with its intimations of a greater purpose and sacrifice

revealed by the shadow of the ship's boom on the ice.

A higher dimension to the expedition

would also be suggested by Shackleton's experiences on South Georgia much later on.

Shackleton here climbs the crow's-nest and shouts down instructions to Frank Worsley,

who in turn signals in semaphore to the helmsman.

The helmsman is James Wordie, the expedition's geologist,

though soon circumstances will force a change of subject for him,

as he inevitably became more involved with glaciology than geology.

The colour tinting, shown in these shots of icebergs

and elsewhere throughout the film,

was common among films of the period.

In the time before natural-colour film stocks became available,

the audience's desire for colour was satisfied

by the use of colour dyes being added to the monochrome print:

A practice that was common and expected.

Such colour enhanced the photography and the dramatic effect

and the results were often singularly beautiful.

Thus the film in its colourful form is how its original audience would have seen it,

when it was first exhibited in 1919.

The Endurance journeyed on through the progressively icy waters

through December and January.

On January 10th, land was spotted

and they were but a week's journey away, but they were fated never to attain it.

The ship inched its way along the coastline, seeking an opening amid the floes,

but a blizzard arose and the Endurance went to the leeward side of an iceberg.

When the gales finally subsided on January 18th,

the Endurance progressed a little further

but the pack increasingly hindered their progress,

while land was only now a day's sail away, had clear water existed.

By the end of January it was evident that they were stuck fast

and likely to be so for the entire season.

The Antarctic landmass was within their sights just 80 miles away,

but here began a nine-month period of imprisonment,

as they drifted helplessly away from their goal in the tight grip of the polar ice.

Shackleton was bitterly disappointed at this turn of events,

because not only did it spell the end of his planned crossing of Antarctica,

but in all probability, it spelt the end of his career as a polar explorer,

as he would be unlikely ever to raise the funds

or indeed to have the energy to organise another expedition.

But it was at this dark moment that his greater qualities came through.

The polar summer was now coming to an end and the crew of the Endurance

found themselves facing the prospect of months of inactivity in a frozen ship,

increasingly shrouded in complete darkness as the sun disappeared.

It was Shackleton's great strength that he kept his men occupied

and able to live in comparative comfort with one another

over the nine months that they drifted back along the Weddell Sea,

until still greater challenges were to face them.

The scenes here show the Endurance in February 1915,

shortly before she became completely frozen in,

when leads would occasionally appear in the ice

and hopes were raised that a route might be forced.

Here, a break in the ice had formed a few hundred yards from the ship

and the men urgently cut at the intervening ice with saws and pickaxes.

Shackleton wrote of this day:

"Early in the morning of the 14th, I ordered a good head of steam on the engines

and sent all hands onto the floe with ice chisels, prickers, saws and picks. "

"We worked all day and throughout most of the next day,

in a strenuous effort to get the ship into the lead ahead. "

"The men cut away the young ice before the bows

and pulled it aside with great energy. "

"After 24 hours' labour we had got the ship a third of the way to the lead,

but about 400 yards of heavy ice,

including old rafted pack,

still separated the Endurance from the water. "

"And reluctantly I had to admit that further effort was useless. "

"Every opening we made froze up again quickly,

owing to the unseasonably low temperature. "

"The young ice was elastic

and prevented the ship delivering a strong, splitting blow to the floe,

while at the same time it held the older ice against any movement. "

"The abandonment of the attack was a great disappointment to all hands. "

The brash ice, seen being poled away here, was more of a hindrance than it appeared,

as it created a deadening cushion effect

that greatly impeded the ship's progress.

Alfred Cheetham, third officer on the Endurance, had experience of the Antarctic,

having been on previous expeditions with both Shackleton and Scott.

He would be one of the few of Shackleton's men to die in combat in the First World War,

drowning after a torpedo attack on a minesweeper in 1918.

The drama of the moment was ideal for Frank Hurley

and he recorded the activity when not taking part in the hacking and sawing himself,

positioning his cine camera with seemingly foolhardy closeness,

to secure one of the most astonishing shots in the entire film.

Here, when the ship, momentarily free,

passes down the lead, closer, ever closer, to Hurley's camera.

What a great, courageous and inspired cameraman Frank Hurley was.

All in vain, the unworked ice would not yield.

The polar winter meant increasing days of almost total darkness,

leading until midwinter's day in June

and Hurley was naturally very restricted in what he could film.

Most of the following scenes of the imprisoned Endurance and her crew

were filmed in March and April.

As will have been observed, the film makes much use of Hurley's still photographs:

Their deft and dramatic compositions.

This mixture of still photograph and motion picture shows all 27 of the ship's crew,

minus Hurley, of course, who was taking the pictures,

with Shackleton standing third from left to the front.

Shackleton took great pains to stave off the boredom and frustration

that would inevitably come over his men in the encroaching darkness

and with the ship frozen in.

He imposed a strict winter routine,

abandoning normal ship's routine and no longer maintaining normal sea watches.

Instead, one man was night watchman in turn,

while the others adopted a regular pattern of work by day and sleep by night.

He ensured that every hand was playing his part in the smooth running of the expedition.

Because the engine room was not running, the cabins become too cold for inhabiting

and fresh winter quarters were established in the storage areas between decks,

with new cubicles being constructed by the ship's carpenter, Harry McNish.

The men dubbed their new quarters "The Ritz".

Entertainments in the evening were devised.

Songs were led by the meteorologist, Leonard Hussey, who had brought a banjo,

and there was a contest to name the worst singer on board,

won comfortably by Shackleton himself.

Hurley gave lantern slide shows of his travels to the Far East

and his previous Antarctic journey with Douglas Mawson.

Though the entertainment value to the crew of seeing still further views of ice and snow

may be questioned.

Mock trials were held and were very popular

and plays, parlour games, chess, guessing games: Animal, vegetable & mineral.

Everyone read enthusiastically and wrote up their experiences each day in their diaries.

Water, naturally, had to be gathered from blocks of ice,

shown here being gathered and hauled up into the ship's hold.

And Frank Hurley himself required up to a ton of ice each time

for the solution and washing of his cine films,

as part of the developing process.

Itself an agonising job with constantly freezing water and splitting fingers.

A key feature in keeping the men occupied and amused in the months of imprisonment

were the dogs.

Took particular care of the puppies, born in January.

The tending of the dogs, their division into various teams

and the work and the races that then followed,

were all invaluable in creating a focus for the men's interest and maintaining morale.

The crew were otherwise mostly idle.

The scientists kept to the limited routine available to them.

The ship's engineers were without occupation

and the doctors had more to do in attending to the dogs than to the men.

As it was, a number died of worm infestation.

It is also worth remembering the sad fact

that after a certain point in this film, we see no more of the dogs.

Very simply and necessarily,

when supporting them finally became impractical,

they were shot

Here, Frank Worsley and Reginald James are shown preparing seal meat for the larder.

Steaks were cut in long strips from the head to the tail of the seal

and laid out on the ice, where they froze into long, firm pieces like boards.

Fresh seal and penguin meat was essential in augmenting their provisions

and in maintaining good health,

Among some of the ingrained superstitions revealed among the sailors,

one named Thomas McLeod refused to eat penguins

because he believed the souls of dead fishermen resided within them.

Others looked upon the scientists' skinning of penguins with great suspicion

and thought that they might be looking for gold hidden inside their stomachs.

Their stomachs were in fact more likely to yield freshly caught fish:

Far more valuable in the circumstances.

It was essential that the dogs were regularly exercised

and here preparations are being made for an Antarctic derby,

held between the various dog teams, which took place on June 15th.

Shackleton, standing on the left, acts as timekeeper.

The first team to set off is headed by Alexander Macklin,

followed by that captained by his fellow surgeon, James Mcllroy.

Frank Wild's team follows

and although they start badly by overturning their sledge, they were the eventual winners.

Frank Hurley's own dog team was shown next, led by Shakespeare

and those shown here on the sledge are Worsley, Macklin

and chief officer on the Endurance, Lionel Greenstreet.

Leonard Hussey, the smallest member of the expedition, was the meteorologist,

whose previous experience of travel had been very different,

as he had been an archaeologist in the Sudan prior to joining Shackleton.

His most notable contribution to the expedition

was to be his banjo playing,

as illustrated at the start of the film.

It was probably more for such skills and his general adaptability,

rather than his somewhat incidental interest in meteorology,

that Hussey joined the Transantarctic Expedition.

Although in the dark of midwinter Hurley was unable to film,

he nevertheless set up this famous set of flash photographs of the Endurance.

Taken on the 27th of August 1915,

with the temperature in the minus 20s Fahrenheit,

Hurley positioned 20 flashes on mounds of ice around the ship,

ten flashes alone being required to illuminate the ship.

The haunting image of a ghost ship presaged the Endurance's approaching fate.

As the titles indicate,

an important activity was the construction of a system of ice pylons linked by wire,

to guide wanderers back to the ship in the darkness or during blizzards.

The pylons are built up from blocks of ice

and cemented together by having water thrown over them, which quickly froze.

This still photograph illustrates the result.

A sad failure of the Shackleton expedition was the motor-sledges.

Much hope was placed in these caterpillar-track vehicles

and they had a special engineer devoted to their care:

The solitary and widely unpopular Thomas Orde-Lees, seen here driving the sledges.

They turned out to be hopeless on the varying surfaces of the ice,

rapidly coming to a halt, as these pictures show,

and they served no practical purpose throughout the expedition.

Orde-Lees was a public-school man,

who was acutely unhappy at Shackleton's egalitarian regime on the ice,

though he was a slavish admirer of Shackleton himself.

His acerbic but observant diaries

have proved to be an invaluable source of information

for writers seeking to understand the character of the expedition.

The Shackleton expedition was, nominally at least, a scientific one

and took with it a geologist, a magnetician, a biologist and a meteorologist.

Everyone was involved in hauling up the dredging nets,

which brought up specimens from the depths.

This was all for the benefit of the Scotsman, Robert Clark, the expedition's biologist,

who is shown examining the dredging nets.

He was a taciturn sombre figure, single-mindedly dedicated to his task,

widely respected for his uncomplaining taste for hard work.

Sadly, all his specimens were to be lost when the ship eventually succumbed to the ice,

an outcome that was now inevitable.

As the title dramatically puts it,

with the arrival of August, it was the beginning of the end for the Endurance.

It was to be a prolonged death.

The ship was starting to creak and groan alarmingly under the pressure from the ice

and to buckle to an extent that it seemed impossible she could remain in one piece.

Here, Shackleton, perhaps playing up just a little to the camera

with his shrug of the shoulders and his arms akimbo,

and his second-in-command, Frank Wild, examine the rudder,

which had become damaged by a large projection of ice.

The blizzard at the start of August threw up huge blocks of ice that buckled the ship,

though she recovered from this,

and the onset of the polar spring set the men to talking about their reaching open water

and returning to civilisation.

But the pressure from the ice returned and grew

and eventually on October 16th, the ice forced the Endurance upwards

and eventually left her resting at a tilt of 30 degrees.

Water began to break through and the ship's pumps were manned continuously,

while others dug away desperately at the sides of the ship,

trying to create trenches to offer some sort of breathing space.

Others gathered belongings and stores for the likely disembarkation onto the ice.

A silent film cannot indicate the sounds of pouring water,

the roaring of the ice, the groaning of the woodwork

and the frequent snapping sounds of cracked timber

that accompanied this frenzied activity.

While the leaks seemed to be under control, some hope remained,

but on October 27th, the ice pressure only increased.

The ship was knocked further up, its rudder was smashed

and then the keel was pierced and further water poured in.

Shackleton wrote in his journal:

"After long months of ceaseless anxiety and strain,

after times when hope beat high and times when the outlook was black indeed,

the end of the Endurance has come. "

"Although we have been compelled to abandon the ship,

which is crushed beyond all hope of ever being righted,

we are alive and well and we have stores and equipment for the task that lies before us. "

"The task is to reach land with all the members of the expedition. "

"It is hard to write what I feel. "

"To a sailor, his ship is more than a floating home

and in the Endurance I had centred ambitions, hopes and desires. "

"Now, straining and groaning,

her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping,

she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career. "

The sequence here showing the ship being crushed by the ice

has been deliberately undercranked by Hurley:

The film was put deliberately slowly through the camera by turning its handle too slowly.

This has the effect of making the action seem speeded up,

so that the ice can be shown moving.

It also has the effect of making the men on deck move around over fast.

The ship was locked up further by a pressure ridge and the keel torn open.

Water gushed in.

The order was given to abandon ship

and Shackleton, naturally, was the last to leave.

All stores were off-loaded onto the ice and the dogs slid down canvas chutes.

Camp was made on the ice beside the stricken ship

and was given the name Dump Camp.

Among the chaos on the ice

are the three boats that would later be essential for the party's escape,

notably the James Caird,

which was to figure so significantly in the later stages of this extraordinary drama.

They were 350 miles from Paulet Island, the nearest land,

and naturally, not a soul in the world knew where they were,

not least the relief party on the other side of the continent,

whose efforts, unfilmed, were to be all in vain

and to ultimately result in the death of three men.

However, not a man was to die under Shackleton's command.

Shackleton now planned a march across the ice.

He ordered that as much gear as possible was to be left behind,

with each man carrying just basic supplies and two pounds of personal possessions.

Significantly, in view of what we are able to see today,

this meant that Frank Hurley had to leave behind his cine camera

and all of his bulky glass-plate photographs.

There was, it seemed, to be no picture record of the Transantarctic Expedition after all.

Very soon, however, the proposed march across the ice, hauling the three boats,

was abandoned as hopelessly impractical.

The surface and the conditions made progress almost impossible

and Shackleton instead decided to pitch a second camp entitled Ocean Camp,

a mile and a half away from the wreck of the Endurance

and to await the break-up of the ice.

With the march halted, many among the crew returned to the ship

to retrieve the possessions they had been forced to abandon.

Most significant amongst them was Frank Hurley,

who with one of the sailors, Walter How,

returned to the Endurance and determined to rescue cine films and photographic plates.

These were held in the ship's refrigerator, which now lay below the water line.

Breaking his way through broken timbers and having failed to get the films with hooks,

Hurley stripped himself to the waist, dived into the mushy ice in the hold of the ship

and was eventually rewarded by retrieving each of the tins,

which had been so well soldered that the contents were quite safe.

He required swift massage to restore his circulation,

but was then confronted by an angry Shackleton,

demanding to know what he was up to.

Hurley diplomatically explained to Shackleton what should have been obvious:

That the expedition's expenses, to a very large degree,

depended on the preservation of the cine film and still photographs.

Shackleton relented,

Shackleton and Hurley made a selection of 120 plates from those taken by Hurley,

and the remaining 400 were smashed on the ice,

to avoid all temptation to preserve them.

Hurley, thereafter, took with him just some roll film and a small pocket camera

and left his bulky cine camera behind.

These views of the stricken Endurance

are the final moving pictures of the expedition that Frank Hurley took,

though not the final ones that we shall see, as shall be explained.

With characteristic patience and uncanny sense of timing,

Hurley was in perfect position to record the final death throes of the ship,

notably the snapping of the mast,

leading to the bitter point on November 21st 1915,

when she finally sank beneath the ice.

"She's gone, boys" were Shackleton's simple, heartfelt words.

Indeed there was little anyone could think to say in the desolation of the moment

and Hurley's pictures alone are more eloquent than words.

Now a further six months of frustration lay ahead for Shackleton and his men,

as they drifted north, waiting until the ice broke up and they could put to sea

and to the nearest land.

Hurley made no further use of his cine camera.

The desolation of Ocean Camp is poignantly portrayed in these still photographs.

Shackleton and Hurley shared a tent and are shown here, Shackleton on the left.

Most of the inhabitants of Ocean Camp are pictured here,

with Shackleton and second-in-command, Frank Wild, standing nearest on the right.

These scenes of a dog team, being led by Lionel Greenstreet,

were presumably taken earlier, since Hurley had, by now, disposed of his cine camera.

It was at this time, March 1916,

with the supply of seal meat dwindling,

the dogs' own demand on the precious larder becoming ever more of a burden

and the impossibility of taking them on the boats,

that the decision was taken to have them all shot.

Frank Wild, it was, who carried out the unhappy task.

Now, with Hurley down to very few frames of film,

a considerable part of the drama is depicted in a very short space of time,

with the aid of paintings produced long after the event.

In simple flashes, we see the hauling of the boats to a third camp, Patience Camp,

with the wreck of the Endurance in the background.

A photograph of Patience Camp itself,

where the waiting dragged on and foul weather kept them mostly to their tents.

April 1916, the ice having finally broken, the men all took to the three boats:

The James Caird, the Stancomb Wills and the Dudley Docker.

The camp, made on an ice floe,

brief respite during an agonising six days and six nights' voyage,

with clothes frozen stiff, all the men desperately thirsty.

This floe, it was, that cracked and sent one of the sailors, Holness, into the water.

He was swiftly fished out, but only kept alive by relays of men

keeping him moving vigorously all night.

Now the titles tell us that they have reached Elephant Island,

though they can give no indication of the desperate state the men were in

by the time they finally made it to this barren land on April 15th 1916:

The first solid land they had known after almost 500 days spent on ice and water.

Yet this was only the next stage of the adventure, the next step to survival.

Since Elephant Island, on the northern tip of Antarctica, was quite desolate,

hundreds of miles from an inhabited land and did not fall across the path of whalers,

no-one would ever find them there.

Thus, leaving the main body of his men behind, under the charge of Frank Wild,

Shackleton and five men: Frank Worsley, Tom Crean, Harry McNish

and two of the sailors, McCarthy and the troublesome Vincent,

set out in the James Caird for South Georgia,

800 miles away across some of the roughest seas in the world.

They set sail on April 24th 1916

and only a few photographs of their departure

and a single painting of their unparalleled 17-day journey,

document one of the most heroic and courageous episodes in maritime history.

Hurley and his camera remained behind on Elephant Island.

It is here, somewhat oddly it would appear at first, that motion pictures return,

showing us the inhospitable face that South Georgia offered to Shackleton,

though without the mountainous seas with which he had to contend.

In fact, all the scenes of South Georgia that follow were filmed by Hurley long afterwards.

Once he had been rescued and had returned to Britain with his films and photographs,

and never in the history of expedition film making had a set of films

been through such adventures before making it to the screen,

it was recognised that further scenes would have to be taken

to complete the film before it could be released.

Hurley instantly volunteered to return to South Georgia

and hence these scenes representing Shackleton's time on the island

were taken a whole year later.

Shackleton and the five crew members of the James Caird arrived in the wrong,

that is uninhabited, side of South Georgia

and leaving the other three behind,

Shackleton, Worsley and Crean scaled the uncharted mountains of South Georgia.

This would have been an achievement enough in itself in normal conditions,

but following immediately after an unparalleled boat journey,

it all but slips into the realms of fantasy.

Having landed on the island on May 11th,

the trio set out on the 19th for what would be a distance of only 22 miles,

but over the most mountainous and inhospitable terrain, and without any map.

The journey lasted 36 hours

and of their adventure across unknown mountain sides, glaciers and snowfields,

Shackleton wrote:

"When I look back at those days, I have no doubt that Providence guided us. "

"I know that during that long and wracking march of 36 hours,

over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,

it seemed to me that often we were four, not three. "

"I said nothing to my companions on the point,

but afterwards Worsley said to me,

'Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was someone else with us. "'

"Crean confessed to the same idea. "

"One feels the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech

in trying to describe things intangible,

but a record of our journeys would be incomplete

without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts. "

This intimation of the ineffable may possibly have occurred to Shackleton after the event,

but the emotion is an understandable one

and the idea of Shackleton and his companions experiencing a fourth presence

became a significant influence on TS Eliot's poem The Waste Land.

"Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you"

Instead, the film now shows us a great deal of what made it a commercial proposition

when it was first shown to the public in 1919.

When Hurley returned with his films to Britain in mid 1916,

it was pointed out that not only were scenes of South Georgia required

to fill in the missing gaps of the story,

but that substantial scenes of animal life were required.

For all the heroism on display and the skill of Hurley's expedition photography,

what was wanted to make the film sellable to the general public,

was scenes of curious Antarctic animal life.

In short, the public wanted to see penguins.

The films Herbert Ponting had taken of Scott's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole,

had proved to be a great popular success,

to a very large extent on account of the animal photography.

Hurley saw Ponting's film while he was in London and was impressed by its quality

and by how Ponting's admirable lecturing skills made characters out of the creatures.

On his return to South Georgia, he followed suit

and gave us these scenes, expertly filmed in themselves,

though they undoubtedly deaden the drama.

But this is how the film was presented in 1919

and it is as just such an original document that it is presented now.

It is to be noted that the title writer

employs some ingenuity in connecting the various animal scenes

with the experiences of Shackleton taking place off camera.

Of the crossing of South Georgia, the camera can show nothing except the scenery.

These scenes show Stromness,

the whaling port where Shackleton and the other staggered into the town,

their faces blackened, their clothes in tatters.

Two young boys came across them first and ran away in fright.

Shackleton made his way to the manager of the whaling station, introduced himself

and asked first if the war was over.

He received the sombre reply "The war is not over. "

"Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad. "

The men from another world, that Edwardian world,

were thus introduced to the brutalities of the new one.

Shackleton, Worsley and Crean rested,

enjoyed clean clothes and hot baths for the first time in two years,

then boarded ship to retrieve the three men left on the other side of the island,

before trying to rescue all the men left on Elephant Island.

Before they do, we have scenes of Stromness and the whaling on which it thrived

and we meet the animals of South Georgia once more.

It is a commercial film that we are watching, after all.

And now the film comes to its conclusion with rapidity.

Having retrieved the three men he left on the other side of South Georgia,

Shackleton made four attempts to get his ship to his men on Elephant Island.

On the fourth attempt, the Chilean tug Yelcho made it through the icy waters to the island,

where the men had taken to living in the two upturned boats

and were running desperately close to having no provisions at all

after four and a half months in utter isolation.

Hurley's last frames of film recorded that ecstatic moment on August 30th 1916,

when they sighted the Yelcho in the distance and knew that they were rescued.

Shackleton had brought his men through and not a life had been lost.

They enjoyed an ecstatic reception in Chile,

where these scenes were presumably filmed by a local cameraman.

Soon the members of the Transantarctic Expedition would be back in Britain

and coming face to face with a world that cared too little for Antarctic explorers,

while a world war raged and thousands were being slaughtered on the Somme.

The expedition members all sought swiftly to take part in the conflict.

Several took up posts in the armed forces and served with distinction.

Mcllroy was wounded at Ypres, Cheetham was torpedoed and drowned.

Frank Hurley, having returned to South Georgia to take further films,

became a war photographer on the Western Front and in Palestine.

He would go on to enjoy a long career as a documentary film maker

and as one of Australia's greatest photographers.

His film, entitled South in Britain,

and In The Grip Of The Polar Ice in his native Australia,

was first shown at the end of 1919, when Shackleton lectured to it daily

in urgent need of recouping funds to pay off his expedition.

It had been, in Shackleton's own words, a "glorious failure"

and now that it was over, he was a lost man.

Various official posts concerning the war amounted to very little

and apart from publicising his book of the expedition and the film,

Shackleton searched in vain for some activity to give his life further meaning.

In the end, he found a backer for another expedition south of uncertain purpose

and in 1921 set out again on the quest.

On the outward journey, he died of a heart attack on South Georgia, where he is buried.

With his passing, the heroic image of polar exploration,

with its grand follies, but grander virtues,

came to an end.

Subtitles by Claudia Cohn, Intelfax Media Access