Part 1 of 3.

Explorers called it the 'Great White Silence', an inhospitable continent of rock, ice and snow on which no human has stepped until just over 100 years ago. Girdled by an ocean packed with shifting ice and beyond that, the roughest oceans on the planet with waves as tall as apartment blocks driven in the never ending vortex around the planet by shrieking gales.

A terrible place, but a place that drew the attention of the world as the last great, unexplored region. But one man who stands out is an explorer who failed in everything he set out to do, but whose toughness, his courage and his leadership has made him a legend, Sir Ernest Shackleton.

In this series, Dan Snow will be travelling to Antarctica to retrace Shackleton's most celebrated voyage, to the point at which his ship, Endurance, was crushed and sunk and retracing his remarkable journey towards safety. He will set out to understand how they lived on the ice, how they survived in this bleak, unforgiving seascape and take a deep dive into one of the most remarkable and unlikely escape stories in history.

In the first episode, Dan studies the near suicidal quest that inspired Shackleton and his crew setting out on my own journey south. He'll trace it all the way to the point when their ship was encased in ice, cut off entirely from a world that was engulfed in war. This is the story of Endurance, her crew and Shackleton's astonishing journey.