They drifted north on giant pieces of ice, hunting seals, sea leopards and penguins, until the floes broke up and they launched the three lifeboats they had salvaged from The Endurance. Shackleton and his crew of 27 bailed from the ship just days before it was crushed by ice floes in the Waddell Sea. The ship outfitted to get them to the first landing spot (the “get-there” boat) was christened The Endurance.īut, The Endurance never landed on the continent. The successful explorers would board the second boat for home. This time, he would land with a party of six men and 70 dogs on one side of the continent, while another ship would land on the opposite side and lay in supplies on the route on the back side of the pole.
In a previous expedition, Shackleton came within 97 miles of the pole before turning back due to a shortage of food. He planned to lead an expedition across the continent, right through the South Pole.
Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition was green lighted in 1914 despite the outbreak of World War I. I read the book while locked down in prison (prison is my own fault, the lockdown courtesy of the coronavirus.) It is an odd but effective comfort to read about people surviving far worse than you are currently struggling with. This utterly gripping book, based on firsthand accounts of crew members and interviews with survivors, describes how the men survived, how they lived together in camps on the ice for 17 months until they reached land, how they were attacked by sea leopards, had to kill their beloved dogs whom they could no longer feed, the diseases which they developed (an operation to amputate the foot of one member of the crew was carried out on the ice), and the extraordinary indefatigability of the men and their lasting civility towards one another in the most adverse conditions conceivable.Astronaut Mark Kelley recommended Alfred Lansing’s Endurance (1959) as a book to read to help get through the coronavirus shelter-in-place conditions (Time Magazine, May 2020.) The account of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition in 1914 is both a thrilling adventure story and a reminder that there are many things more difficult to survive than having to stay six feet apart from people we do not live with. For five months Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways on one of the most savage regions of the world. In October 1915, still half a continent away from their intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in ice.
The object of the expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland. In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men set sail for the South Atlantic on board a ship called the Endurance.
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