|
|
 |
         
|
 |
| The Endurance began life as a well-appointed tourist vessel called Polaris, constructed in Norway at the Framnaes yard in Sandefjord and designed to take rich visitors to the polar regions. It hadn't sailed before Shackleton purchased it for £11,600 and renamed it Endurance after his family motto: 'By endurance we conquer.'
Endurance was a 300-ton, 144-foot (44-metre) sailing ship - a barquentine - and was built of planks of oak and Norwegian fir up to 2.5ft (0.75m) thick, which were sheathed in extra-strong greenheart wood. Its engines burned coal or oil and its top speed under steam was 9-10 knots. The ship was kitted out with ten cabins. The officers and scientists on board had their quarters in the deckhouse. However, the ship's designers knew that the deckhouse cabins would be too cold in the bitter Antarctic winter, so double cubicles - each measuring 6 by 5ft (1.8 by 1.5m) - were constructed in the storage space between decks. The ordinary sailors lived in the forward part of the ship, on the lower deck. The two groups ate separately but often socialised together. The ship was also equipped with a wireless receiver (but no transmitter), a gramophone and a darkroom for the expedition's photographer Frank Hurley. It is his evocative photographs - particularly of Endurance trapped in the ice - that have made this failed expedition so memorable.
|
