But their ordeal was far from over. The likelihood of anybody coming across them was vanishingly small, and so after nine days of recuperation and preparation, Shackleton, Worsley and four others set out in one of the lifeboats, the James Caird, to seek help from a whaling station on South Georgia, more than miles away.
For 16 days, they battled monstrous swells and angry winds, baling water out of the boat and beating ice off the sails. The next day, the wind eased off and they made it ashore. Help was almost at hand; but this, too, was not the end. The storms had pushed the James Caird off course, and they had landed on the other side of the island from the whaling station.
And so Shackleton, Worsley and Tom Crean set off to reach it by foot—climbing over mountains and sliding down glaciers, forging a path that no human being had ever forged before, until, after 36 hours of desperate hiking, they staggered into the station at Stromness.
There was no conceivable circumstance under which three strangers could possibly appear from nowhere at the whaling station, and certainly not from the direction of the mountains.
And yet here they were: their hair and beards stringy and matted, their faces blackened with soot from blubber stoves and creased from nearly two years of stress and privation. Relaying the James Caird across the ice, Antarctica, November Once the other three members of the James Caird had been retrieved, attention turned to rescuing the 22 men remaining on Elephant Island.
Yet, after all that had gone before, this final task in many ways proved to be the most trying and time-consuming of all. The first ship on which Shackleton set out ran dangerously low on fuel while trying to navigate the pack ice, and was forced to turn back to the Falkland Islands.
The government of Uruguay proffered a vessel that came within miles of Elephant Island before being beaten back by the ice. His companions grew increasingly dispirited and doubtful. But Shackleton procured a third ship, the Yelcho, from Chile; and finally, on August 30, , the saga of the Endurance and its crew came to an end.
It had been days since the James Caird had left; within an hour of the Yelcho appearing, all ashore had broken camp and left Elephant Island behind.
Twenty months after setting out for the Antarctic, every one of the Endurance crew was alive and safe. Explorer Frank Wild - looking at the wreckage of the Endurance, The team will take different submersibles this time after the type of vehicle used on the previous quest went missing.
If the group succeeds in finding Endurance, they'll map it and photograph it, but they won't retrieve any artefacts. Shackleton's ship is a site of historic importance and has been designated as a monument under the international Antarctic Treaty. It mustn't be disturbed in any way. And of the shipwrecks out there, it is the most famous one still left to be discovered and also the most difficult to locate. And we hope to broadcast all of this at the time," he told BBC News.
Trapped in sea-ice for over 10 months, the explorer's Endurance ship drifted around the Weddell Sea until ultimately it was crushed by the floes and dropped to the deep. How Shackleton and his men then made their escape on foot and in lifeboats has become the stuff of legend. Where the Endurance went down in 3,m of water is well known; the ship's captain Frank Worsley logged the position using a sextant and a theodolite.
But reaching this part of the Weddell Sea, just east of the Larsen ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, is extremely difficult, even for modern ice-breakers.
Dr Shears and colleagues managed it in , operating from the South African-registered research ship, the Agulhas II. They deployed an autonomous underwater vehicle AUV over the presumed wreck site, but after 20 hours below, the robot submersible lost contact with the surface. The new mission is being funded by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust. The nearest open water could be km or more away. One of the "good" years was , which allowed the German research vessel Polarstern to make a very close pass and conduct some limited mapping echosounding of the seafloor.
The resolution was never going to be sharp enough to detect the Endurance but it has yielded interesting insights into the nature of the ocean bed - with encouraging implications for the likely state of the wreck. Endurance is probably lying on flat terrain that has been undisturbed either by erosion or by underwater landslides.
Sediment deposition is also expected to be low, at a rate of less than 1mm a year. And at 3,m, it's way below the maximum depth of any iceberg keel. Glaciologically and geophysically - Endurance should be unharmed. This all augurs well for future attempts to find what is among the most famous of all wrecks. It's certainly right at the top of the list of targets for David Mearns, whose expertise in finding lost ships is world-renowned.
He commented: "It is a shame the search failed in their attempt to locate Endurance's wreck as they had the best ice conditions seen in the past 17 years. Prof Dowdeswell is pessimistic that anyone would fund a mission with the sole objective of locating the Endurance. Most future efforts, he believes, will be "add-ons" to more broader scientific expeditions to the region - as was the case with his venture last year which had the primary objective of studying the melting and retreat of the Larsen ice shelves.
It was a balance between exploration and science," he said.
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