August 1914. While World War I rears its head across Europe, Sir Ernest Shackleton begins a daring expedition to be the first man to cross the Antarctic on foot. With him on his ship Endurance are twenty-eight crew members, sixty-nine sled dogs, a gramophone, a bicycle, and Merce Blackboro, a seventeen-year-old stowaway hidden amidst oilskins and sea boots. Their journey into the ice is by way of the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. But the Antarctic summer is short, and their passage remains resolutely closed to them. In the Weddell Sea the Endurance is trapped for months in pack ice and finds itself delivered up to an uncertain fate.