I've been reading Adam Hochschild's excellent book, To End All Wars, and just got to the part where famed explorer Ernest Shackleton washes up on the shores of  a Norwegian whaling station after a year and a half of wandering across the Antarctic and sailing in a small boat by dead reckoning more than 800 miles from Elephant Island. Because the expedition began around the same time the Great War started, he wanted to know when and how it ended, only to learn that it was still going on. "Millions are dead and the world has gone mad,"  he was told, instantly rendering the particular type of heroism demonstrated by Shackleton and his crew obsolete.

It reminded me that I had seen a documentary some years ago about the voyage of the Endurance that contained film footage taken by a member of the expedition, Australian photographer, Frank Hurley. So I decided to track it down and watch it again.

I couldn't remember whether I'd seen the The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2001), starring the voice of Liam Neeson, or some accidental channel-surfed episode of Nova, Shackleton's Voyage of Endurance (1999). I found the latter on YouTube and watched it in little pieces and realized the film I was remembering was, in fact, South, the silent film made by Frank Hurley himself and the one I'd stumbled across on the shelves of the late, great Video Vault, the only store in my area of its kind that was choked to death last year by exorbitant rent and (yes, I know) Netflix.

The photographs and stills from the expedition are breathtaking. I present some of them here in this slideshow.

The story is heroic, terrifying, deeply moving, and true. If you want to know what happened to all those dogs, please watch the playlist of (what I think is) the Nova documentary on YouTube.

I broke down and put South on my Netflix queue. But I feel sick about it.