Shackleton and five other men set out in a 20-foot lifeboat for the island of South Georgia with the intent of sending rescue back for the remaining men. The island, however, was remote-even by Antarctic standards-meaning it was basically impossible for a passing ship to discover them. The crew made a treacherous journey across the open water to Elephant Island. Shackleton ordered that the crew abandon the ship and make camp on the ice, and a month later the Endurance disappeared beneath the water completely. Months later, the breaking up of the ice only worsened the ship’s condition. It was meant to be the first land crossing of Antarctica, but the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, conceived of by explorer Ernest Shackleton, was cut short when their ship, the Endurance, became trapped in an ice floe. Of the 900 men that survived the initial sinking, only 316 would make it out of the water. It would take four days for rescue to finally come in the form of seven naval ships. Though three naval stations had received the Indianapolis’ distress signal, none reacted to it. There were about 15 sailors on this, and suddenly, 10 sharks hit it and there was nothing left,” said Eugene Morgan, one of the surviving crew. “We had a cargo net that had Styrofoam things attached to keep it afloat. Men died of exposure, killed each other, or were attacked by sharks. With only a few lifeboats and a delay in rescue being deployed, the situation was dire, to say the least. On July 30, 1945, the heavy cruiser that had delivered the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, was struck by two torpedoes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half an hour.” So begins the monologue Robert Shaw delivers in Jaws that would solidify the story of the USS Indianapolis in popular memory. Despite this unfathomably harrowing ordeal, all eight of the surviving men would resume their seafaring ways. The two remaining whaleboats, which had previously drifted apart, were rescued separately by passing vessels. The remaining men reached the terrible conclusion that consuming the remains of the dead was the only chance they had at survival. It only took a few days for their food supply to run out and, one by one, the whalers started to die.

Though most of the remaining men decided to make for Easter Island, three chose to stay behind (and were eventually rescued). After a month at sea, they made landfall on a small atoll where, after a week, they had depleted its meager resources.

The 20 men split across three small whaleboats, only two of which had any navigational instruments. Whatever the reason, the whale rammed the Essex two times before swimming away and leaving the crew to their grim fate. It’s not certain what prompted the abnormally large sperm whale to attack the Essex-perhaps the sound of repairs had drawn its attention, maybe it had been harpooned before and was acting in self-defense. The ship encountered a squall that nearly sank it, razed a Galápagos island while resupplying, and found the whale grounds where they’d meant to hunt fallow-prompting the risky decision to sail for the offshore whaling grounds located thousands of miles from the South American coast. The Essex and her crew had been experiencing a streak of bad luck even before they had their fateful encounter. The story of the whaleship Essex is forever immortalized as the true story that partially inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

True survival story