Frank Hurley's Antarctic Negatives Still Anchor the Shackleton Legend

More than 150 glass and celluloid negatives by Frank Hurley, official photographer to Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917, sit among the two million items in the Royal Geographical Society's collections. A new book, The Endurance Photographs: A Definitive Visual Record of Shackleton's Expedition, published by Chronicle Books, draws on that archive, with a foreword by Alexandra Shackleton, the explorer's granddaughter.

Alexandra Shackleton writes that she learned the story of her grandfather's expedition aboard the Endurance through Hurley's images rather than family storytelling. Her father Eddie, Shackleton's youngest child, was only 10 when Ernest died of a heart attack on January 5, 1922, during the Shackleton-Rowett Quest expedition.

"I learned the story by asking about the Hurley photographs on the walls," she recalls. The questions were not always innocent. One photograph showing Endurance trapped in the ice, reduced to a skeleton with sled dogs sitting around her, prompted a persistent childhood question: "What happened to the dogs?" The adults deflected for years before she was deemed old enough for the truth — as on most expeditions of the era, the men killed and ate the dogs when food ran short.

The images could confuse adults too. One family visitor studied a view of snow-covered peaks and a glacier tumbling into a fjord choked with floating ice, then announced triumphantly: "I know where that is! It is Lulworth Cove!" It was South Georgia, but the family christened the photograph "Lulworth Cove" anyway.

Shackleton recruited Hurley after seeing his 1913 documentary Life in the Antarctic, made following Hurley's stint as official photographer on Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–1913. With departure imminent and Hurley deep in the Australian bush, he became almost certainly the only polar photographer ever retrieved by an Aboriginal tracker.

Hurley regarded himself as an artist rather than a mere recorder of events, and did not scruple to embellish his subject matter, adding or subtracting details. His commitment was physical: he lay down in front of the moving ship and climbed high into the mast carrying heavy camera equipment. When the Endurance went down, Hurley dove into icy water to salvage his glass plate negatives and cinematograph film.

His cine film South, originally released in 1919 as In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice, was the first time Alexandra Shackleton saw her grandfather moving and smiling. Its footage of the ship's death — cameras set around the vessel, masts crashing down — carried a personal cost for the explorer himself. From December 1919 to May 1920, Shackleton gave public lectures on the film, twice daily suffering the pain of seeing his ship lost. The film's success paid the expedition's debts.

Alexandra Shackleton names her favourite negatives: "The Endurance Crushed by the Ice"; "Head of Moraine Fjord, South Georgia"; "The Long, Long Night," for which Hurley set twenty phosphorous flares around the ship, creating what she calls "an enchanted ship, a vision for the eyes"; and "On the Drifting Flow, Ocean Camp," showing Shackleton beside Frank Wild, the men appearing serene on the drifting ice above the Weddell Sea. "The image shows humankind's infinite adaptability," she writes.

The Endurance legend has only grown. Shackleton ranked eleventh in the BBC's 2002 poll of the "100 Greatest Britons of All Time." Kenneth Branagh played him in a 2002 television drama. In 2016 the Royal Mail issued Shackleton stamps using Hurley's images, and Paul Frith's Shackleton Symphony was recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. NASA named a lunar crater "Shackleton" and a Martian crater "Endurance." As Alexandra Shackleton concludes: "With the links to Shackleton reaching beyond the stars, he does indeed cast a long shadow. The part played by Hurley's negatives is incalculable."