“I had not anticipated that the work would present any great difficulties,” Shackleton wrote. Yet everything went tragically wrong when the Ross Sea ship, the Aurora, tore free of her moorings and disappeared in a gale, leaving ten men marooned with only the clothes on their backs and few provisions. With little hope of rescue from a world embroiled in World War I, the men decided to accomplish their mission against all odds.

Long overshadowed by the mission these men bargained their lives to sustain, this heartrending story of survival against all odds now gets its due in this definitive, surprising account of the final journey of the heroic age of polar expedition.