Endurance - An Epic Story of Survival - Episode 6 - The James Caird

In this episode, Shackleton makes the decision that will define his legacy. With 22 men stranded on the desolate rock of Elephant Island, he selects five companions — including Tom Crean and navigator Frank Worsley — and sets sail in the James Caird, a 22-foot lifeboat, for South Georgia Island. Eight hundred miles away. Across the Drake Passage — the most violent stretch of ocean on the planet. What follows is 16 days of almost incomprehensible hardship: mountainous waves, ice forming on the rigging in the dead of night, sodden sleeping bags disintegrating around the men's bodies, and an unrelenting cold that pushed every man aboard to the very edge of what a human being can endure. Through it all, Tom Crean proved irreplaceable — unwavering on watch, steady in spirit, and possessed of a quiet good humour that never abandoned him. The other men came to rely on one simple reassurance in the darkness: if Crean was still singing to himself on watch, the world had not yet ended.