Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic Expeditions, Pt. 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry, as folks
are probably aware. On March nine of this year, the
Falcon's Maritime Heritage Trust announced that the Endurance twenty two

(00:24):
expedition had found the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship
Endurance in the Wettal Seat in Antarctica. We got tons
and tons and tons of notes from listeners about this,
and then I was surprised to discover that we didn't
already have an episode on Shackleton or on this expedition
in which the Endurance was lost. It's kind of about
an intersection of things that are a little bit of

(00:47):
a running theme in the show. We've got Exploration, We've
got a shipwreck. So I decided it was time to
fix that, and to fix it twice. Because while Shackleton's
expedition aboard the Endurance has become his most well known
expedition to Antarctica, it wasn't the only one, and one
aspect of the expedition is often overlooked. This turned into

(01:08):
a two parter and there's also just there's so much
still going on in the world right now that I
enjoyed spending my time immersing myself in this dramatic rescue,
and I thought other folks might as well. Heads up, though,
this is about survival and extreme conditions. And while there
is no cannibalism and there's no loss of the entire

(01:31):
party as happens in a lot of these other stories,
there are some human deaths, and there are a lot
of animal deaths, including eating the meat from animals that
might be taboo and some cultures. So while I find
it to be an overall positive story, there are difficult
parts to it, less harrowing than it could be, not

(01:55):
entirely void of chagrin, right so. Ernest Henry Shackleton was
born in County Kildare, Ireland, on February sevent eighteen seventy four.
He was the second of ten children born to Henry
and Henrietta letitiaus Sofia Shackleton. Henry Shackleton is often described
as a doctor, but when Ernest was born he was

(02:17):
a farmer. Then in eighteen seventy nine and eighty, economic factors,
poor weather and potato blight sparked a famine in parts
of Ireland. This wasn't nearly as deadly or destructive as
the Great Famine of the eighteen forties and fifties, which
we have covered on the show before, but it did
lead to hunger and hardship, and it was after this

(02:37):
that Henry Shackleton decided to become a doctor. The Shackleton
family moved to Dublin so Henry could study medicine at
Trinity College. Then from there they moved to Croydon and
then to Sidnham, where Henry established a medical practice. Croydon
and Sydnham are both part of Greater London today, and
the family home in Sidnham was not far from the

(02:58):
Crystal Palace. Everything connects. Ernest's early education involved being taught
at home by a governess. Eventually he was enrolled at
fir Lodge Preparatory School and then at Dulwich College. He
particularly loved reading, and he came in second in English
history and literature during his last year at the school,

(03:19):
but much to his father's displeasure, he decided to end
his education at the age of sixteen and go to
see He wanted to join the Royal Navy but he
didn't have the money to do that, so he joined
the Merchant Marine instead. He didn't give up his love
of books, though, he was always known for reading literature
and poetry. While at sea. Shackleton worked his way up

(03:41):
through the ranks, sailing all over the world, and he
earned his certificate as a Master Mariner in April of
eighteen ninety eight at the age of twenty four. He
also became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London.
During the South African War also known as the Second
Boer War, he worked as an off around ships that
carried mail and packages back and forth between Southampton, England

(04:04):
and Cape Town, South Africa. One of those voyages was
aboard the Tintadgel Castle, where Shackleton served as third officer,
and in March of nineteen hundred he and the ship's
surgeon W. McLean published O. H M. S Or How
twelve hundred Soldiers Went to Table Bay. This was an
account of the voyage and it was Shackleton's first major

(04:26):
published work. It was also on this voyage that Shackleton
met Lieutenant Cedric Longstaff, whose father was one of the
major financial backers of the British National Antarctic Expedition, which
was being headed by Captain Robert falcon Scott. This was
also called the Discovery Expedition for the ship that carried it,

(04:47):
and Shackleton wound up joining the expedition as the Discovery's
third lieutenant. For context, this was during the Heroic Age
of Antarctic exploration that spanned from eight to nineteen twenty two,
and during that twenty five year period, eight different countries
embarked on sixteen major polar expeditions. This included the Race

(05:09):
to the South Pole between rold Amondson and Robert falcon Scott,
which was a recent Saturday classic, and that race took
place roughly a decade after the Discovery Expedition. Unlike the
Age of Discovery roughly five hundred years before, this Heroic
Age of Antarctic exploration didn't involve purportedly exploring places that

(05:31):
already had an established indigenous population. Although Antarctica was known
to the Maori roughly a thousand years before it was
known to Europeans, and it may have been visited by
Polynesians in about the seventh century. At the same time,
though there was a similar sense of scientific inquiry and
nationalism and commercialism running all through both of these periods,

(05:54):
and both were competitive. The nation's involved all wanted to
be the first to discover or achieve something and to
plant their flags somewhere new. The public also followed the
polar expeditions with intense interest. They were through such remote,
inhospitable territory with limited supplies and an even more limited

(06:15):
ability to keep in touch with the rest of the world.
Everything lent itself to dramatic accounts of tragic losses and
heroic rescues and courage under the most arduous and terrifying
of circumstances, which people only got to hear about after
a team made it back to some semblance of safety,
or after another team found what was left of them

(06:36):
and came back with their journals and logs. The British
National Antarctic Expedition that Shackleton joined in nineteen o one
wasn't the first British expedition to the Antarctic. That was
the British Antarctic Expedition, which was also known as the
Southern Cross Expedition. That expedition had embarked in but the

(06:58):
Southern Cross Expedition and was privately financed, while the Discovery
expedition was an official British effort that was backed by
the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society. The sense
of competition and bragging rights and who got to be
first even extended to these two British efforts. The Royal
Societies were not all that pleased that a privately financed

(07:22):
venture with a largely Norwegian crew under the command of
a Norwegian who had settled in Australia had basically scooped
them on the way to Antarctica. Aboard the Discovery, Shackleton
was in charge of the stores, which he liked, and
measuring the density and salinity of seawater samples, which he
did not. He also edited and typed a magazine that

(07:44):
the crew put together, called South Polar Times, and he
saw some tensions aboard the ship. Scott was an officer
in the Royal Navy, but Shackleton had come up through
the Merchant Navy, joining the Royal Navy Reserve. When he
joined the Discovery's crew. A lot of the Royal Navy
men looked down on people like Shackleton, and Royal Navy

(08:05):
officers usually observed a formality that a lot of the
men from the Merchant Navy really didn't was sped into
a lot of divisions and stratification, and Shackleton didn't really
like that. He and Scott also had different temperaments and approaches,
and they butted heads a lot. In spite of those differences,
Shackleton was chosen to accompany Scott and zoologist Dr. Edward

(08:27):
Wilson on a journey over the Ross ice shelf at
the time called the Great Ice Barrier. They were headed
south as far as they could go, all the way
to the South Pole if possible, but they didn't get
nearly as far as they wanted. They had too much
gear to carry it all at once, so they had
to divide their loads and carry them in a relay.

(08:48):
None of them really had any experience handling dogs or sledges,
and many of their dogs died or had to be shot. Plus,
Scott was really determined to press on, even when they
were all sick and obviously running out of food, and
Shackleton and Wilson had to really work to convince him
to turn back. By the time they got back to base,

(09:09):
all three men had scurvy, and Shackleton's condition was bad
enough that he was sent home on a supply ship
in nineteen o three. Scott dismissed him with a generally
favorable note, quote, this gentleman has performed his work in
a highly satisfactory manner, but unfortunately his constitution has proved
unequal to the rigors of a polar climate. It is

(09:31):
with great reluctance that I ordered his return, and trust
that it will be made evident that I do so
solely on account of his health, and that his future
prospects may not suffer. For Shackleton's part, he later maintained
that he had not been nearly as sick as Scott
had made it sound. So there is some speculation that

(09:51):
he was sent home in nineteen o three not because
he was seriously ill, but because Scott was tired of
dealing with him. We'll get to what Shackleton did after
getting home after a quick sponsor break. After getting back

(10:13):
to the UK Ernest Shackleton spent some time as a journalist,
and he published an account of the voyage. He became
secretary of the Scottish Geographical Society, and he ran for parliament.
He did not win that election. He also got married
to Emily Mary Dorman on April nine of nineteen o four.
They eventually went on to have three children, Raymond, Cecily,

(10:35):
and Edward, and he started planning and raising money for
an expedition to reach both the geographic and magnetic South Poles,
which he announced in February of nineteen o seven, and
he was not the only person working on an expedition.
When Robert Falcon Scott heard about Shackleton's announcement, he got
in touch, noting that he also had unannounced plans for

(10:57):
the poll. Scott asked Shackleton not to use his base
on Ross Island at McMurdo Sound, and the two men
had kind of a tedious back and forth about it,
with Scott trying to claim the whole sound essentially as
his territory and Shackleton arguing that he didn't object to
Scott retaining control of the base he had already established,
but he couldn't just say that no one else could

(11:19):
use the entire sound. By the time Shackleton departed, they
hadn't exactly come to an agreement, but Shackleton had agreed
to avoid the area if he could. Scott in this
whole exchange kind of comes across the saying I licked
all of this right, all mine. I peed a circle
around Antarctica. You can't go there. So, as with the

(11:42):
Southern Cross and Discovery expeditions back in eighteen nineteen o one,
there was this sense that Shackleton and Scott were rivals
in this instead of each of them organizing expeditions for Britain,
that we're all working towards the same goal. And this
extended beyond this dispute between the two men themselves. Shackleton's
expedition was funded through loans and donations, and it didn't

(12:04):
have official backing or funding from the government or the
British Admiralty or the Royal Geographic Society. All of those
entities were really focused on backing the expedition that Scott
was still planning when the Shackleton expedition departed. Shackleton's expedition
was also known as the British Antarctic Expedition, and it

(12:25):
was called the Nimrod Expedition for the ship they were on.
The ship set sail that August after being inspected by
King Edward the Seventh and Queen Alexandra. Shackleton himself was
not on board though he and several other members of
the expedition stayed behind and wrapped up some loose ends
before taking another ship south and meeting up with the
Nimrod in New Zealand. They were kind of in a hurry.

(12:49):
The reason Shackleton had announced the expedition when he did
and set the timeline was out of fear that some
other expedition was going to get to the poll first
if they didn't so some of their funding and supplies
that had to be cobbled together pretty quickly. This meant
he had to buy a much smaller, older ship than
he really wanted because it was the only one he

(13:10):
could afford. The Nimrod was so small that it could
not hold their personnel, their gear, and enough call to
both power the ship and laugh to the expedition, so
another ship had to tow the Nimrod from New Zealand
to Antarctica. While some aspects of the expedition seemed kind
of thrown together, Shackleton had also taken the time to

(13:32):
consult with Norwegian explorers Fritty Off Nonsen and Auto Sufdrop
to see what he could learn from their expeditions through
the Arctic. He didn't take all of their advice, though,
when the Nimrod set sail for Antarctica, it was carrying dogs, sledges,
and a prefabricated insulated hut that could be assembled once
they arrived, something that freed up a lot of space

(13:53):
on board for other materials and equipment. But he also
had a dozen Manchurian ponies and a car that was
meant to help haul all their gear. Nonsen and sur
Drop had advised against both the ponies and the car,
but Shackleton had stuck to his plan, arguing that the
ponies could haul a lot more than dogs could and

(14:14):
that the car had been specially modified for Arctic conditions.
Shackleton was not the only person to try to use
ponies in Antarctica. That was also part of Scott's expedition
that happened later. The Norwegians were always like, I don't
know why the Americans think that dogs are not the
best way to go. They keep insisting on these ponies.

(14:35):
The Nemerod arrived in Antarcticle on January first, nine eight
after having stopped in New Zealand, but when they got
to Antarctica, many of their potential landing points were blocked
by ice. The only place they could find that seemed
workable was not far away from Scott's base on Ross Island.
Shackleton didn't think he had any other choice but to

(14:57):
set up his camp where he could as far away
from Scott's bace as he could feasibly get, but Scott
really saw this as a betrayal and an attempt to
horn in on his expedition. After dropping off the shore party,
the Nimrod returned to New Zealand. The shore team spent
the last months of the summer establishing a camp, climbing
them out Arabis Volcano, taking scientific observations and readings, and

(15:21):
generally preparing to ride out the Antarctic winter before departing
for the polls. As a note, Antarctica has two seasons,
with summer stretching roughly from October to February and winter
from March to September. On September, Edgeworth David left for
the Magnetic South Pole, and then Shackleton left for the

(15:42):
geographic poll on October twenty nine. Shackleton's team took the
four surviving ponies because again they had not fared very
well and David's team had the car. Both teams struggled.
They had to fight against heavy winds on their outbound trip.
That's specially modified car worked best on flat ice, but

(16:03):
much of the terrain the team needed to cover was
not flat, or it was covered in deep snow. Even
in the best conditions, it was prone to overheating and
breaking down, so David's team could only use it to
set supply depots for the return trip, and they had
to haul their gear to the pole themselves. And although
some expeditions to the Arctic Circle had used ponies successfully,

(16:27):
the ones that Shackleton brought to Antarctica did not farewell.
As we said. Some had gotten sick or injured while
still at sea, or they had to be shot. Early on,
on the very first day of their trek to the poll,
a pony kicked a member of Shackleton's team in the
legs so hard that it exposed bone. The ponies often
sank in deep snow up to their bellies. It made

(16:48):
it just impossible for them to haul their equipment. Some
of them also died after eating volcanic sand, and one
died after falling into a crevass. Shackleton's team also ran
low on food and so they wound up eating or
storing some of the ponies meat, and then as the
ponies died, they also ate their leftover fodder. Shackleton made

(17:11):
it farther during this expedition than he had during his
attempt with Robert Falcon Scott, but on January seven, nine
o nine, he and his team turned back after realizing
they would run out of food if they kept going.
They were about ninety seven nautical miles from the South Pole.
On their return trip, they had a hard time finding
the supply depots that they had left on the way out.

(17:33):
On January, they ran completely out of food, so one
of the men went ahead to the next supply depot
and returned with some pony meat, and then they all
got dysentery after eating it. Meanwhile, David's team successfully reached
what they believed to be the magnetic South Pole on
January sixteenth of nineteen o nine. They planted a British
flag there and they took pictures. Something we know today

(17:56):
that they didn't know at the time is that the
Earth's magnetic poles moved around due to the changes in
the magnetic field. Later on, geologist Douglas Mawson also realized
that some old calculations had been off when they had
been trying to figure out where they were going, and
so what they planted the flag on was more on
the outskirts of the magnetic polar region, not like centrally

(18:21):
located on the pole. They also dealt with snow, blindness
and hunger, and a grueling pace on their return trip.
They were trying to get back to the nem Rod
in time for it to depart before risking getting frozen in.
They succeeded. They were back aboard the Nimrod on February five.
As ice and bad weather started to threaten the ship,

(18:44):
it had to leave McMurdo Sound to find a safer harbor.
But that meant that when Shackleton's team got back to
camp on February there was no ship They're waiting to
pick them up. To make things worse, in the last
days of their return trip, surgeon and cartographer Eric Stewart
Marshall had collapsed, so Shackleton and Frank Wilde had left
him behind with second in command Jamison Boyd Adams, so

(19:07):
they could try to get help from the Nimrod. Shackleton
and wild set fire to one of their huts and
the crew aboard the Nimrod saw their signal and returned
to pick them up. A team went back for Marshall
and Adams, and then the Nimrod left with everyone aboard
on March four nine. Some of the men were injured

(19:28):
or very sick, and they had to leave a bunch
of personal items and equipment behind because they were afraid
if they took the time to load it on the
ship they were going to get stuck there in the ice.
But ultimately they had all survived. The team had written
and printed copies of a book called Aurora Ostrallis while
overwintering in Antarctica. Shackleton, leader, worked with Edward Saunders to

(19:48):
write a two volume work, The Heart of the Antarctic.
We'll get to the next phase of Shackleton's life. After
another quick sponsor break, the Nimerod expedition returned to England

(20:08):
in June of nineteen o nine, and Shackleton reunited with
his wife. When he was telling her about his decision
to turn back rather than pressing on for his goal
of the Geographic South Poll, he said, quote, better a
living donkey than a dead lion. I love that quote
so much. I don't even know what to do with myself.
I'm like yeah. Although he hadn't had official funding or

(20:31):
backing when he departed for the South Pole, Shackleton was
hailed as a hero. When he returned, he was knighted
and awarded the Royal Geographic Society Gold Medal, and he
received about twenty thousand pounds to help pay off the
expedition's debts. Shackleton went on a lecture tour. He talked
about the expedition's experiences and discoveries, and he gave away

(20:52):
a lot of the money he earned from that. He
also used the expedition's fame to raise money for charities.
He did things like having the m Rod towed to
Temple Pier so that members of the public could tour it,
and then he donated the money that they paid to
go aboard to hospitals. During this time, rold Amondson's team
reached the Geographic South Pole, and at that point Shackleton

(21:15):
started thinking about another ambitious plan, the Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition,
which would cross the entire Antarctic land mass. He started
planning this in n and quickly realized that the crossing
would take almost four months at minimum, which meant that
there was just no way they could carry everything they
would need with them, so he planned for two teams

(21:38):
aboard two ships. The Endurance would carry one team to
the wet All Sea to trek across Antarctica. The Aurora
would carry another team, the Raw Sea Party, to McMurdo Sound.
The raw Sea Party, under the command of A. E. McIntosh,
would travel inland and place depots every sixty miles to
supply the Endurance team for the second half of the journey.

(22:01):
Funds for this expedition came from private donors and the
British Government and the Royal Geographic Society and Shackleton recruitive Team.
A lot of them were people who had been to
Antarctica previously, either with him or otherwise. There's a probably
apocryphal advertisement that comes up. A lot is part of
this effort, but it's fun, so I'm gonna read it.

(22:22):
Quote men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold,
long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return, doubtful,
honor and recognition in case of success. I want that
to be like every job ad going forward. It isn't
a lot of books about like best advertisements, but nobody

(22:44):
has been able to track down anywhere that it actually ran.
And it's one of those things where the first places
that it appears in print that we've been able to
find our many years later, mostly in books about advertising.
But regardless of all of that, just as he was
preparing for departure on June nineteen fourteen, Archduke friends Ferdinand

(23:08):
of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenburg were assassinated.
Soon Britain was at war, and of course it seemed
like this expedition would no longer be a priority. Without
talking to anyone about it, including the people financing the expedition,
Shackleton offered the Endurance to the British government for the

(23:28):
war effort. That offer was declined, and First Lord of
the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, advised Shackleton to continue as planned.
The Endurance set sail on August eighth, nineteen fourteen. Shackleton
was not on the ship when it left. He once
again stayed behind to handle business in Britain and caught
up with the Endurance in Buenos Aires. When the Endurance

(23:51):
left there for Antarctica. It carried twenty eight people, sixty
nine Canadian sledging dogs, and one cat that was Mrs Hippy,
who turned out to be male, and that name was
given to the cat because he was particularly fond of
the ship's carpenter, Harry McNish. Like a lot of other carpenters,
he was nicknamed Chippy. One of the twenty eight people

(24:13):
was a stowaway that was Percy Blackborow, who had been
turned away when he applied for the expedition because of
his youth and inexperience. Some of the crew smuggled Blackborow aboard,
and although Shackleton was livid when he found out about this,
Blackborrow was eventually made the ship steward and apparently did
a good job at that. Although Shackleton was to lead

(24:35):
the voyage across Antarctica, the ship's captain was Frank Worsley.
The team also included a biologist, a meteorologist, a physicist,
and a geologist. James Francis Hurley of Australia, known as Frank,
was the official photographer and advanced sale of the rights
to his work was a source of funding for the expedition.
George Marston was the expedition's official artist. They made their

(24:59):
way to Antarctica via South Georgia Island in the Southern
Atlantic Ocean. South Georgia Island is British Territory and it
was home to a Norwegian whaling station at Gritviken. The
Endurance arrived at grit Viken in early November of nineteen fourteen,
and the sailors there told them that the weather had
been unusually wet. That was a signal that the sea

(25:21):
ice in Antarctica had not broken up yet. Shackleton had
planned to stay at grit Vicken for just a few
days to take on food and other supplies, including to
live pigs, but he wound up staying until December five,
hoping that as the Antarctic summer progressed, the sea ice
would break up enough for the ship to pass through.

(25:41):
The Endurance got to the edge of the pack ice
two days later, and the crew spent the next six
weeks trying to make their way through it. The ship
was powered by both steam and sails, so if they
found a crack in the ice they could try to
force their way through it, but this was really slow
going and sometimes they had to backtrack entirely as they

(26:02):
wound up somewhere that the ice was totally impassable. In January,
the Endurance started to get stuck. Men got off the
boat and tried to hack away at the pack ice
with things like chisels and crowbars, trying to break through
enough that the ship's steam power could open a path.
Or they would see an open channel of water and
try to break away the ice so the ship could

(26:24):
just get there. But none of these efforts worked, and
as January turned into February, it became clear that they
were stuck until the end of winter. Over Wintering on
the ship while stuck in the Antarctic pack ice had
not been part of the plan, and the ship just
wasn't really outfitted for that. Most of the crew quarters

(26:46):
were higher up in the decks. They were not insulated
enough to make them livable over the winter, so the
crew rearranged things to make their situation more comfortable. They
cleared out a storage area between the decks and they
built these little cubicles to us his sleeping spaces. With
a stove running, it was fairly warm, and the crew

(27:06):
nicknamed the space the Rits. They also used ice blocks
to build houses on the ice for the dogs and
the pigs. They nicknamed these dog loose and pigloes. They
reallocated the ship's rations to account for all twenty eight
men over wintering there, instead of leaving only a smaller
party behind. They supplemented their food by hunting things like

(27:27):
seals and penguins. They also tried to keep everyone's morale
up with things like hockey and soccer games, and reading
aloud and putting on plays, just trying to think up
ways they could entertain one another. Meteorologist Leonard D. A. Hussey,
had a banjo, and he and some of the others
made up songs to play on it. They also played

(27:47):
with all those dogs and worked with them on sledging,
sometimes holding races between the teams. Frank Hurley documented all
of this through still images and film. Many of these
images still exist day, and they are hauntingly beautiful. Shackleton
had tried to prevent the kinds of divisions and hierarchies
that he had seen in his first expedition to Antarctica.

(28:10):
Everybody worked regardless of what their role was on the
expedition and whether that work would normally be part of
their job. They had to keep an eye on the ice,
including overnight, so if the ice suddenly cracked, they would
know what was happening. And he arranged the watch rotation
so that as many people as possible, we're getting a
good night's sleep, and everyone got a turn keeping watch.

(28:33):
When the rations were redivided, they were distributed so that
everybody got some of the best food, rather than keeping
all the best stuff for the officers. Although Shackleton was
focused on keeping everyone's spirits up by July, he also
thought the loss of the Endurance was inevitable, saying to
Frank Worsley, what the ice gets, the ice keeps. In August,

(28:55):
pressure started to lift up huge blocks of ice in
the ice pack. The grinding ice flattened to the dog's
ice houses. The dogs had to be evacuated back to
the ship, and the ice was putting enormous amounts of
pressure on the ship itself. Again and again. The team
thought that the ice was about to overwhelm the ship
and crush it or cause it to capsize. As the

(29:18):
weather started to warm and some of the ice started
to melt, things were still very treacherous. On October, the
ice briefly opened around the Endurance, and it was afloat again,
but everything quickly refroze. On October, ice damaged the hull
and the ship listed sharply enough that items aboard were
thrown into disarray. The crew lashed down everything they could

(29:42):
and they tried to move boulders of ice away from
the ship with poles. But a day later it looked
like the ship might be able to free itself. The
pool of open water around it was big enough that
they caught a glimpse of a whale down there, but
everything around that pool was frozen solid. Shackle to and
ordered the boilers to be lit so they could get

(30:02):
under way if the ice opened up, and the men
started clearing all the ice they could and the debris
away from the ship's rudder. Four days they did everything
they could to keep the ice clear and be prepared
to go at a moment's notice, But then on October,
pressure from the ice converged on the ship from three directions.

(30:22):
It started taking on water, too much water for the
ship's pumps to clear. The men started to remove all
the gear and supplies from the ship that they could.
As the ship started listing hard to one side, Shackleton
gave the order to abandon ship. On October, he wrote
in his journal, quote, after long months of ceaseless anxiety

(30:44):
and strain, after times when hope beat high, and times
when the outlook was black, Indeed, the end of the
Endurance has come. But though we have been compelled to
abandon the ship, which is crushed beyond all hope of
ever being righted, we are alive and well, and we
have stores and equipment for the task that lies before us.

(31:05):
The task is to reach land with all the members
of the expedition. It is hard to write what I
feel to a sailor, his ship is more than a
floating home. And in the Endurance I had centered ambitions, hopes,
and desires. Now straining and groaning, her timbers cracking, and
her woundscaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life

(31:27):
at the very outset of her career. And that is
where we're ending it for today, not the most upbeat place. No.
And in uh In working on these two episodes over
the course of revisions, I moved this episode break so
many different spots. It made, it made its own little journey.

(31:49):
Where are we going to break this story? We're gonna
break it here with them trapped on the ice. Do
you have listener mail to tide us over while we
wait to find out what happened? I should um. I'm
very excited about this listener mail because it is an
update on the Lucy Parsons mural that we talked about
in the listener mail segment of our Donia Tulis episode.

(32:12):
Listener Catherine had written in talking about a mural and
I had not been able to track down uh information
about the mural before we got into the studio. So
this came to us just this morning on Twitter from Stummiko,
who sent us two links to two different Lucy Parsons
murals in Chicago. So thank you Sumico for sending this.

(32:35):
The one that Catherine was describing at Belmont and Kenzie
is by Chema Scandal and was dedicated in And this
is uh a mural of Lucy and a pink hat.
Her face is like green on one side and a
darker pink on the other, and there's a very very
colorful kind of swirly background. When I had gone googling

(32:59):
to try to figure out out more about this mural
and who the artist was, the only result I got
about a Lucy Parson's mural in Chicago was for a
totally different mural that's sadly no longer exist. That is
the one by Mike ellwitts Uh. This was called Teamster
Power and it commemorated ups strike and in the mural,

(33:20):
which again it's like the whole side of a building.
It's very big. Lucy is on one side of it,
and Albert is on the other side, and there's a
whole lot that happens in the middle. I had incorrectly
thought that the picture that Katherine sent was like a
crop of a smaller piece of this much bigger mural.
It was not. It was a totally different thing. Um.
Sadly though that building that it was painted on no

(33:42):
longer exists. It has been replaced, so that mural, even
though that was the mural I was able to find
when trying to answer this question, actually no longer exists.
So now we know the mural that Katherine wrote about
is by Gemma scandal Um. The are very visually different murals.

(34:03):
And I was like, I feel like this has to
be a crop of the other one. I'm not sure
wearing this picture it would go. Uh. Now I know
it's because I was wrong. Thank you against you we
go for sending some tweets about that this morning. Uh,
thanks to everybody who sends us email. We are at

(34:25):
history podcast that I heart radio dot com if you
would like to send us a note. We're also all
over social media at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and
you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or
wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you

(34:46):
missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I
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your favorite shows.

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