Ernest Shackleton from Kildare, the expedition leader, Frank Worsley, captain of the wrecked Endurance, second officer Tom Crean from Kerry, seaman Tim McCarthy from Cork, and two other crewmen sailed 800 miles in the James Caird, a 20-foot open boat, to bring help from the whaling station at Grytviken in South Georgia. They survived the horrendous boat journey and organised the rescue - not a life was lost. All of them were heroes.

'We were twenty-eight men facing winter on a bleak barren beach of Elephant Island - there was a possibility of a fatal shortage of food - there was no hope of rescue - Plainly the thing to do was to take a boat to the nearest inhabited point.'  Ernest Shackleton