Nimrod arrived at McMurdo Sound on 29 January, but was stopped by ice 16 miles (26km) north of Discovery 's old base at Hut Point. From the safety of the deck, he and his comrades peered through binoculars at the beach where so many of them had lived in fear and hope. After nine days of recuperation, Shackleton, Worsley and four others took one of the boats another 8oo miles (1,300km) across rough seas and in biting winds to South Georgia. Yelcho, commanded by Captain Luis Pardo, and the British whaler Southern Sky reached Elephant Island on 30 August 1916, at which point the men had been isolated there for four and a half months, and Shackleton quickly evacuated all 22men.

Deep in the Weddell Sea, conditions gradually grew worse until, on 19 January 1915, Endurance became frozen fast in an ice floe.

Facing hunger, loneliness, near-mutiny and what has come to be known as the greatest small-boat journey in history, this is their story. Escutcheon Or, on a fess Gules, three lozengy buckles, tongues paleways Gold; on a canton of the Second, a cross humettée of the Third. Thus physicist Reginald James was asked if he could sing; [81] others were accepted on sight because Shackleton liked the look of them, or after the briefest of interrogations. In a small boat, the six men spent 16 days crossing 1,300 km of ocean to reach South Georgia and then trekked across the island to a whaling station.

Using basic navigational tools, Frank Worsley, the ship’s captain and navigator, recorded its location. Even as they were within touching distance of their goal, the elements hurled their worst at them: “The wind simply shrieked as it tore the tops off the waves,” Shackleton wrote. The first ship on which Shackleton set out ran dangerously low on fuel while trying to navigate the pack ice, and was forced to turn back to the Falkland Islands. It was led by Robert Falcon Scott, a Royal Navy torpedo lieutenant lately promoted commander, [18] and had objectives that included scientific and geographical discovery.In January 2016, Shackleton featured on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail on the centenary of the Endurance expedition. Scott chose Shackleton to accompany Wilson and himself on the expedition's southern journey, a march southwards to achieve the highest possible latitude in the direction of the South Pole. The government of Uruguay proffered a vessel that came within 100 miles of Elephant Island before being beaten back by the ice. A statue of Shackleton designed by Charles Sargeant Jagger was unveiled at the Royal Geographical Society's Kensington headquarters in 1932, [142] but public memorials to Shackleton were relatively few. In January 2013, a joint British-Australian team set out to duplicate Shackleton's 1916 trip across the Southern Ocean.