Shackelton's Incredible Voyage was written by Alfred Lansing and is about a group of people who set out to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to Antarctica where they planned to cross the continent from east to west on foot. The expedition took place in 1915.
             Ernest Shackleton is the main character and captain of the Trans-Antarctic expedition. He has a crew of 27 men. This was Shackleton's third voyage to the Antarctic. He had also sailed with another expedition to the poles in 1901 and 1907.
             To complete this expedition, Shackleton built two massive ships that could conquer the cold and ice. One ship would be the main ship that took Shackleton and his crew to the east coast and the other ship would be waiting for them on the west coast.
             They had planned to skirt the Weddell Sea "and its evil (ice) pack and find the coast ...ice-free" It didn't happen. The ship was blown and pushed into the ice pack in the Weddell Sea and stuck there. "The Endurance was beset. As Orde-Lees, the storekeeper, put it,"frozen, like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar....The Endurance was one microscopic speck, 144 feet long and 25 feet wide, embedded in nearly one million spuare miles of ice...".
             On October 24,1915 the pressure of the ice movement became enough to buckle the decks and break the beams. "...the stern was thrown upward 20 feet, and the rudder and sternpost were torn out of her." Shackleton went into the forecastle and said, "She's going , boys... I think it's time to get off."
             Getting off meant making camp for months on a floating surface of ice flows with their 3 saved boats, their dogs, and the supplies they managed to pull out of the ship while it was being crushed. Then there was an attempt to pull the boats and supplies across the ice toward an island that held the hope of supplies left behind by a previous shipwreck. The ice changed direction and the island was left behind. They lived on the ice eating seals and pengu...