History to Sleep Through

On the last evening of January 1910, four people played cards in a rented house in north London. One of them, the music hall singer Cora Crippen, was never seen again.

The American doctor Hawley Crippen, his typist Ethel Le Neve travelling as his son, the Scotland Yard inspector who crossed the Atlantic on a faster ship to meet them, and the ship's wireless that let the newspapers follow the chase day by day.

Cover photo: Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve in the dock, London, 1910. Library of Congress (Bain Collection), public domain.

Narrated by an AI voice.

Twenty-two men waited on Elephant Island for four and a half months, living under two upturned boats, while Shackleton tried four times to reach them. Life on the island, the ships he borrowed and begged for, and how the expedition ended, including the second party on the far side of Antarctica.

Cover photo: the Yelcho arriving at Elephant Island for the rescue, August 1916. Frank Hurley, public domain.

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After the ship went down, 28 men camped on the drifting sea ice for five months, then took to three lifeboats and reached Elephant Island. From there, six of them sailed a 22-foot boat 800 miles to South Georgia, and three of those six walked across the island's mountains, which no one had ever crossed, to the whaling station at Stromness.

Cover photo: the James Caird being launched from Elephant Island, April 1916. Frank Hurley, public domain.

Narrated by an AI voice.

In January 1915 the Endurance was frozen into the ice of the Weddell Sea, and she never sailed again. How the expedition was paid for, how the ship was built and the crew chosen, the long winter aboard, and the slow drift that left 28 men stranded on the ice.

Cover photo: the Endurance held fast in the ice of the Weddell Sea, 1915. Frank Hurley, public domain.

Narrated by an AI voice.