F.A. Worsley was the skipper of the Endurance, the ship used by Sir Ernest Shackleton in his 1914-1916 expedition to Antarctica, and this is his account of that perilous trip. The Endurance was crushed by ice, and the ship's party of twenty-eight drifted on an ice floe for five months, finally reaching an uninhabited island. From there Shackleton, Worsley, and four others sailed in a small boat to South Georgia, an island eight hundred miles away to find rescue.

"Sir Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) was one of the most indomitable and, in some ways, the most luckless of the Antarctic explorers of the early twentieth century, and this remarkable book...shows him both luckless and lucky, and supremely cool and courageous throughout...Worsley writes about heroics...but he makes us feel to our marrow the conditions that the party endured before all hands were rescued...Worsley emerges from his narrative every inch as stalwart a man as the leader he revered." -The New Yorker