She's going, boys. I think it's time to get off.

The ship was breaking up. She was being crushed, not all at once, but slowly, a little at a time.

The pressure of 10 million tons of ice was driving in against her sides, and dying as she was, she cried in agony. Her frames and planking

her immense timbers, many of them almost a foot thick, screamed as the killing pressure mounted.

And when her timbers could no longer stand the strain, they broke with a report like artillery fire.

When Ernest Shackleton had set out with a crew of 27 men, he had hoped to cross Antarctica.

Unusually bad conditions meant that their ship was slowly hemmed in, and eventually trapped in the middle of a giant ice flow, miles from the coast of Antarctica.

Nevertheless, for months, hope had persisted. There might be some way to get the ship loose, and either make for the Antarctic coast or at least sail back for the safety of home.

The realization that the ship would not escape the ice flow came on gradually and then all at once.

The men hastily constructed a camp and then watched as pressure from the ice flows tore the ship to shreds.

As the masts cracked and crumbled and the ship slowly disappeared under the ice,

the men of the endurance took stock of their situation.

It was 1915. They were hundreds of miles from civilization in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth with limited supplies.

Everything about their situation was uncertain. They didn't even have solid

ground beneath their feet. And their ever-changing location as the ice floes moved made forecasting

a future or making a plan very difficult. They had some sledges and some snow dogs to pull them with,

they had three lifeboats, and they had their own skills and will to live. And they would need it.

As they stared out toward the bleak white horizon,

as they considered the cold and the lack of supplies,

their own unsteady position and their isolation,

one thing became terribly clear.

They were all likely to die out here.

...