"On October 26, 1914, the ship—a hundred-and-forty-foot wooden schooner rechristened the Endurance, after Shackleton’s family motto—set out from Argentina, carrying the men and three lifeboats. Ten days later, the expedition stopped at South Georgia, a glacier-covered island about eleven hundred miles east of Cape Horn, Chile, which Shackleton called “the Gateway to the Antarctic.” The island, deserted except for a few whaling stations, was the explorers’ last contact with civilization.
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