After departure from England on 8th August 1914, the Endurance sailed south through Madeira, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, where they were left for almost two weeks to load supplies and conduct changes of crew. It took a few days before Shackleton joined the expedition in Buenos Aires. This 1st leg south was not easy for all. The Endurance was short of fuel, having used up the wood for the magnetician's Antarctic hut, and there was a lack of discipline on board, commanded by the New Zealander, the high-spirited Captain Frank Worsley. Worsley refers to another fight, this time in Madeira, where “Irving was cut with a sword on top of his head & Barr had a large flower pot broken in his face,” he tells us with pride. Significantly, the names Irving and Barr, as well as two others that are now lost, vanish from the ship's roll within a couple of days of Shackleton's arrival at his ship.
A few days before Shackleton arrived in Buenos Aires, he had arrived with a few other people with a film syndicate, including James Francis Hurley, who was the talented Australian photographer on whom Shackleton's film syndicate had set its hopes. Hurley's destiny was to go into this sort of business. He was independent and stubborn from early childhood and ran away from home when thirteen, and got work at the local ironworks which led him to Sydney's dockyards. While a teenager he bought his first camera, a 15-shilling Kodak box paid for with a shilling a week. The first job he had was to do photography for the postcards and he had progressed onto more pleasant postcards.
On October 26, the Endurance was painted black, and loaded with fresh provisions and sixty-nine Canadian sledging dogs, sailed for the South Atlantic. The company wasn't much comforted by the unusually wet weather in Buenos Aires which suggested that the ice had not broken in the Weddell Sea. Nor could the state of the funding, as usual shaky, have helped Shackleton's peace of mind. Geologist James Wordie had already paid part of his own money for fuel to be bought for Shackleton. The expedition did not have the funds to buy a transmitting plant; and the wireless receiver was aboard the ship. But at last the Endurance would turn her compass towards South Georgia, beyond the Falklands, the last port of call.
Eleven days after leaving Buenos Aires, the Endurance had reached South Georgia on November 5 in a blizzard of snow squalls that made the rugged, steep shoreline, visible only by glimpses, seem like a terrifying ice wall. The company were greeted warmly by the island's small population of Norwegian whalers, and were impressed by the level of amenity their hosts had managed to maintain at this most remote outpost of humanity. There were electric lights and hot water; and the home of the Grytviken station manager, Fridthjof Jacobsen, was not only heated but had geraniums blooming in its bow windows. These charms, however, could not conceal the noxious presence of the whaling industry: The island's natural harbors were full of greasy offal and the stench of decaying whale carcasses, and the waters of Grytviken were red.
The whalers provided Shackleton with supplies of coal and clothing, both bought on credit, as well as important information. No men on earth knew better the seas Shackleton was poised to enter, and they confirmed rumors from Buenos Aires of how exceptionally difficult the ice conditions were this year, with pack ice (a large area of floating sea ice made up of many separate pieces (ice floes) that are packed together by wind and ocean currents.) farther north than ever before. Shackleton was told to postpone his sailing until later in the summer, and thus the brief time he intended to spend in South Georgia stretched into a month.
The time spent by the party during that month seems to have been spent happily enough with the men getting acquainted with each other and familiarizing themselves with their duties. Amid the splendors of the subantarctic scene with its elephant seals and penguins and other birds, they were at last able to get a sense that their adventure to the great white south was really getting underway. The dog handlers took their dogs to a hillside near-by and tried to keep them from indulging in eating up the whale carcasses and digging through the burial ground of the old whalers; the scientists strolled up into the hills and studied the profusion of animal life there, and "secured specimens." Hurley, assisted by Captain Worsley and First Officer Greenstreet, hauled his forty pounds of photographic apparatus to the heights above the harbor of Grytviken and recorded the picture of the Endurance at anchor, made negligible by the awe-inspiring mountain circle around her. Characteristically, Lees tried to go off climbing difficult mountains by himself; and Shackleton, characteristically, forbade him. The carpenter was busy building a cover for the extra deck space.
Endurance sailed from Cumberland Bay of Grytviken in the morning of December 5, 1914. It was fully provisioned with additional cargo that now comprised two pigs for provisions, and with rested crew, the ship was ready for the next leg of voyage. The mountains of South Georgia were still visible in the evening as Endurance continued to move south-southeast. Already the next day, the ship had met many icebergs and by December 7 Endurance had reached the limits of the pack ice.
The Weddell Sea presents a unique configuration with a view to posing the maximum danger for vessels. This sea is enclosed between three belts of land: South Sandwich Islands in the east, Antarctic mainland in the south and Palmer Peninsula in the west. The prevailing current makes the sea circle slowly clockwise. The sea ice formed at any season in this area does not spread to the more warm north, but rather circulates in the endless semicircle until the westward drift accumulates it in the Palmer Peninsula.
For the following six weeks, the ship moved slowly southwards, carefully avoiding and navigating between the loose and pack ice, even breaking through some of it. Shackleton hoped that by staying outside the eastern edge of the pack, he would be able to indirectly move down towards Vahsel Bay. This strategy proved successful only up to a point; he was soon forced to enter the pack ice.