Part 2 of 3.

Throughout this series, Dan Snow is retracing Shackleton’s most famous voyage, taking a deep dive into one of the most remarkable and unlikely escape stories in history.

In this second episode, Dan is in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica, exploring in the wake of Endurance, Shackleton’s ship on his great ‘Imperial Trans-polar Expedition’. On board with the Endurance 22 expedition, mounted by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, Dan travels to the very spot where Endurance was last recorded before she sank beneath the ice in 1915, as the team searches for the wreck, 3000m beneath the surface. Can it still be here, over a century after she sank?

On the ice, Dan examines the story of Shackleton and the crew of Endurance as they fought to survive on their stricken, ice-bound ship. He investigates how they maintained morale and planned to escape this most challenging of environments. Even in 2022 it is one of the last great frontiers of exploration on earth.

This episode also films the original glass plate negatives, photographed by Frank Hurley, the expedition cameraman and still stored by the Royal Geographical Society in London. Aladair MacLeod of the RGS analyses and explains this extraordinary record of the Endurance expedition - a tribute to the courage and ingenuity of Shackleton and his crew, as well as the genius of Hurley.