Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

by Alfred Lansing

The actual position on April 26 was 59°46´ South, 52°18´ West, and it put the Caird a scant 14 miles north of the 60th parallel of latitude. Thus they had just crept over the line separating the “Raving Fifties” from the “Screaming Sixties,” so called because of the weather that prevails there. This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe—and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone. The results are impressive. It begins with the wind. There is an immense area of persistent low pressure in the vicinity of the Antarctic Circle, approximately 67° South latitude. It acts as a giant sump into which high pressure from farther north continually drains, accompanied by almost ceaseless, gale-force, westerly winds. In the prosaic, often studiously understated language of the U.S. Navy’s Sailing Direction for Antarctica, these winds are described categorically: “They are often of hurricane intensity and with gust velocities sometimes attaining to 150 to 200 miles per hour. Winds of such violence are not known elsewhere, save perhaps within a tropical cyclone.” Also in these latitudes, as nowhere else on earth, the sea girdles the globe, uninterrupted by any mass of land. Here, since the beginning of time, the winds have mercilessly driven the seas clockwise around the earth to return again to their birthplace where they reinforce themselves or one another. The waves thus produced ha...