This is an IHeart podcast.

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

The history of exploration is marked by mountaintops reached and oceans crossed by impossible being proven possible through sheer human will. But one particular expedition

stands apart, by almost every metric.

Ernest Shackleton's journey to cross Antarctica was an utter failure.

The frozen continent was not crossed, and Shackleton's ship, the endurance, was hopelessly mired in ice, which nearly crushed it.

So why is it considered one of the most renowned journeys in history? Well,

that, it turns out, is a curious tale. By 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton had already been hailed

as a great explorer of the age. He had already led the Nimrod expedition into Antarctica,

coming within 97 miles of the South Pole. It was the closest that anyone had ever come to the

pole, although the party had to turn back due to near starvation. It established him as a

thoughtful, fearless leader, and beyond that, proved to him that it could be done. And so in

August of 1914, he and a fresh team boarded the endurance and set sail for the southernmost

part of the globe. From the start, there were troubles, though. By January of 1915, Shackleton

and Company had reached the Wad-L-C, where the ship became hopelessly trapped in the ocean ice.

Months passed in this way, a ship adrift in an icy sea, but it would only get worse.

In October, the ship finally gave in to the mounting pressure of the ice and the hull was cracked.

Shackleton's diary from that time showed the dire situation that the crew found themselves in

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