When one of her commissioners, the Belgian Adrien de Gerlache, went bankrupt, the remaining one sold the ship for less than the shipyard had charged – but as Lars Christensen was the owner of Polaris, there was no hardship involved.

She was built under the supervision of master wood shipbuilder Christian Jacobsen, who was renowned for insisting that all men in his employment were not just skilled shipwrights but also experienced in seafaring aboard whaling or sealing ships.

[3] At the time of her launch in 1912 Endurance was arguably the strongest wooden ship ever built with the possible exception of Fram, the vessel used by Fridtjof Nansen and later by Roald Amundsen.

[4] Financial problems led to Gerlache pulling out of their partnership,[4] leaving Christensen unable to pay the Framnæs yard the final amounts to hand over and outfit the ship.

[8] On 26 October 1914, Endurance sailed from Buenos Aires to what would be her last port of call,[38] the whaling station at Grytviken on the island of South Georgia, where she arrived on 5 November.

[44] Over the next days, the crew waited for the southerly gale to release the pressure on the ice, but while the wind backed to the hoped-for south/southwest direction, it remained light and erratic.

As the ship went astern for successive attempts, lines were attached from the bow to loosened blocks of ice, estimated to weigh 20 tons (18 tonnes), in order to clear the path.

[48] On 14 July 1915, Endurance was swept by a southwest gale, with wind speeds of 112 km/h (31 m/s; 70 mph), a barometer reading of 28.88 inHg (978 hPa) and temperatures falling to −33 °F (−36 °C).

This broke up the pack ice into smaller, individual floes, each of which began to move semi-independently under the force of the weather, while also clearing water in the north of the Weddell Sea.

This provided a long fetch for the south-setting wind to blow over and then for the broken ice to pile up against itself while individual parts moved in different directions.

The broken sections of floe closed in around the ship on all sides, jarring the Endurance forward, backwards and sideways in violent fashion against the other slabs of ice.

After over a quarter of an hour, a force from astern pushed the ship's bow up onto the floe, lifting the hull out of the pressure and with a list of five degrees to her port side.

A gale overnight further disturbed the floe, driving it against the starboard side of the hull and forcing a sheet of ice upwards at a 45-degree angle until it reached the level of the scuppers.

[50] All was quiet again until the afternoon of 30 September, by which time there were signs of spring with ten hours of sunlight per day and occasional temperature readings above freezing.

A large floe was swept against the Endurance's port bow and then gripped that side of the ship against the built-up ice and snow on her starboard beam.

On 22 October, the temperature dropped sharply from 10 °F (−12 °C) to −14 °F (−26 °C) and the wind veered from southwest to northeast,[56] and the next day, pressure ridges could be seen forming in the ice and moving near the ship.

[62][63] After a failed attempt to man-haul the boats and stores overland on sledges, Shackleton realised the effort was much too intense and that the party would have to camp on the ice until it carried them to the north and broke up.

The fourth attempt, in the Yelcho (lent by the Chilean government) was successful, and all of the twenty-two members of the crew who had remained on Elephant Island were safely rescued on 30 August 1916 – 128 days after Shackleton had left in James Caird.

[79][80] A 2013 study by Adrian Glover of the Natural History Museum, London correctly suggested the Antarctic Circumpolar Current could preserve the wreck on the seabed by keeping wood-boring "ship worms" away.

[81] A Weddell Sea Expedition to locate and possibly photograph the wreck using long-range autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) was underway in the Antarctic summer of 2018–2019.

[70] Experts speculated that the wreck rested on flat terrain at around 3,000 metres (9,800 ft; 1,600 fathoms), undisturbed by massive sediment deposition and little to no erosion.

[84] According to Julian Dowdeswell of the Scott Polar Research Institute, the known conditions on the sea bed suggested that Endurance should not be damaged and that she would likely be in the same state as she was when she sank in the pack ice in 1915.

He also noted that any future attempts at finding the Endurance would be "add-ons" to other main scientific expeditions to the area, such as the one in 2019, which was launched chiefly to study the melting and retreat of the Larsen ice shelves.

[84] In July 2021, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust announced Endurance22, a new expedition to search for the wreck of Endurance that would launch in early 2022 using Saab submersible technology.

[91] Bergman, Mearns and Stuart were awarded a special Certificate of Achievement by the Royal Institute of Navigation "in recognition of their pioneering data analysis and modelling leading to the successful location of Endurance's wreck".

[97] The discoverers on board the South African research vessel S. A. Agulhas II said that the wreck was in remarkably good condition, and that they had filmed and photographed it extensively, including with ultra-high-definition 3D scanning.

[94] In keeping with the team's promise, they did not salvage any part of the wreck or of its contents, as the ship came under the definition of a protected historic site and monument as set forth in the Antarctic Treaty System.

[102] Reach the World conducted live streams,[103] created educational resources,[104] and published informational updates at regular intervals before, during, and after the expedition.

[106] They were accompanied by Mrs Chippy, a male ship's cat, and originally sixty-nine sledge dogs with additional litters of puppies born during the expedition.

[112] In 2021, Lindblad Expeditions in conjunction with National Geographic launched the Endurance, a polar cruise ship named in honour of Shackleton's voyage.