The Endurance : Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition by Alexander, Caroline - 1998

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998. 235 x 210 mm, x + 214 pp, illustrated with b&w photographs, map, bibliographical references. Upper edge lightly foxed. Cloth-backed papered boards. 'With the remarkable unpublished photographs of Frank Hurley' (front cover of the dust-wrapper). This is an account of one of the greatest survival stories of all time. The story of Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition which set of with a crew of 27 on the Endurance to be the first men to cross Antarctica. Within 80 miles of their destination the ship was trapped fast in pack ice. For ten months they waited for the ice to break but instead the Endurance was crushed, leaving the crew stranded. Caroline Alexander tells the story of the expedition and presents for the first time the visual record of Frank Hurley, whose glass-plate negatives were stored in hermetically sealed canisters that lasted five months on ice floes, a week in an open boat on the polar seas, and five months buried in the snows of Elephant Island. Towards the end of the ordeal, Hurley was forced to abandon his professional equipment and captured some of the most astonishing moments with a pocket camera and a single roll of Kodak film.. First edition.. Hardcover. Very Good/very good.