Endurance
 The Endurance trapped by the ice in 1915. Photo: Frank Hurley
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The Endurance was next to the Aurora one of two ships of the "Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition" (also known as Endurance Expedition ), which was under the direction of the British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and which, despite its failure, has achieved great fame.
The three-masted schooner bark designed by Ole Aanderud Larsen (1884–1964) was built in the Norwegian Sandefjord by the Framnaes shipyard . When it was launched on December 17, 1912, it was named Polaris . It was 43.8 m long, 7.62 m wide and weighed 350 tons. In addition to square sails on the foremast and gaff sails on wholesale and mizzen she had a 260 kW strong steam engine , the top speed of 10 knots allowed (19 km / h). The ship was designed for polar conditions and constructed in such a way that it offered as little surface area as possible for the pressure of the ice masses. With a thickness of 28 cm, the frames made of green heart wood, a particularly stable type of tropical wood, were twice as solid as those of conventional sailors of this size. The hull of the Endurance was designed to be relatively straight, as it was only supposed to drive in loose pack ice. It was therefore quieter in the sea than ships with a spherical hull such as the Fram , but this was bought with the disadvantage that it was not significantly lifted off the pressure line when ice was pressed and was therefore not suitable for inclusion in the pack ice.
The client for the construction was the Belgian polar explorer Adrien de Gerlache and the Norwegian whaling magnate Lars Christensen , who actually wanted to use them for polar cruises of a more touristy nature. Due to financial problems, however, Christensen was happy to be able to sell his ship to Shackleton for £ 11,600 (approx. € 934,000 as of 2010) - an amount that was below the original construction costs. Following the motto of his family "Fortitudine vincimus" ("We win through endurance") Shackleton renamed it Endurance .
The Endurance left the port of Plymouth on August 8, 1914, around a week after Great Britain entered the First World War , and made the journey to Antarctica with a stopover in Buenos Aires without any problems.
However, before the Endurance crew could cross over to the mainland of Antarctica to cross the Antarctic as planned, the ship was trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea in January 1915 like “an almond in a piece of chocolate” - that is the much-used comparison . After the Endurance had withstood the force of the pack ice for 281 days, it was crushed by the ice on November 21, 1915. The expedition team had previously saved themselves on a safe ice floe . Frank Worsley , captain of the Endurance , described the terrible moment for the expedition team in his diary:
"When one knows every nook and corner of one's ship as we did, and has helped her time and again in the fight that she made so well, the actual parting was not without its pathos, quite apart from one's own desolation, and I doubt if there was one amongst us who did not feel some personal emotion when Sir Ernest, standing on top of the lookout, said somewhat sadly and quietly, "She's gone, boys." ”
(“ If someone, like we did, every corner and knows every corner of a ship and repeatedly helped him in the struggle it endured so well, then the time of separation is not without pathos, regardless of our own bleak situation. And I doubt that there was anyone among us who did not was moved when Sir Ernest said a little sadly and quietly on his lookout: "She has passed away, boys." ")
Thanks to a masterful nautical and navigational feat, Shackleton's team managed to get out of this desperate situation without losses with the help of three lifeboats that could be recovered from the Endurance (see Ernest Shackleton , Endurance Expedition ):
Initially on with the pack ice and later on ice floes, the castaways drifted northward in their camps along the Antarctic Peninsula until the floes broke into small pieces. They finally reached Elephant Island in their lifeboats . There one of the boats was rebuilt and set out with 6 men to South Georgia to get help, which actually worked. Months later, the remaining men, who were still stuck on Elephant Island, were rescued with a guard boat from the Chilean Navy .
In memory of the Endurance contributed two icebreakers of the Royal Navy named HMS Endurance . The first ship of this name was in the service of the Royal Navy from 1967 to 1991, the second HMS Endurance served the British Royal Navy from 1991 to 2015. Furthermore, the Endurance crater on Mars as well as the Endurance cliffs and the Endurance are Ridge in Antarctica named after Shackleton's Endurance .
literature
- Literature on endurance can be found in the article Endurance Expedition .
