Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Product Information

It took less than a month before the ship succumbed to its watery grave, but Shackleton's crew had already abandoned hope of accomplishing their original goal. All the grittiness is in this book and nothing is left to your imagination or excluded, the blood, the urine, the shit, the brains, amputation of rotting body parts, starvation, gorging on seal, penguin, dog flesh. For reading his crew, ascertaining what they needed to keep them motivated and focused, and how best to avoid dissension among them. Covering a distance of 800 miles through the Drake Passage it is widely viewed as one of the greatest small-boat journeys ever undertaken.

There are parts of the tale that are long and drawn out, but the tedium is a brilliant reflection of the brutal months the expedition team spent trapped in the pack ice.They take the dogs off the ship to haul supplies, but eventually, they have no choice but to kill them. Although he had no special skills in seamanship or mountaineering, what he did have was a gift for leadership.

Although the prose has the dry style of a biography, the story is never dull, because it's the story of twenty-eight men who are absolutely screwed beyond belief -- and over the next two years, it just keeps getting worse. After leaving the South Georgia Islands, Endurance entered the pack ice and for two weeks made its way through the ice. Eventually, Shackleton and his crew are forced to abandon the ship lest they be crushed by the ice, along with their ship. They teetered on the verge of starvation and freezing to death, lived and slept in the most miserably wet, frozen conditions, with little protection from blizzards and gale-force winds. Earlier this year I read In the Kingdom of Ice, Hampton Sides' excellent book about a doomed expedition to the North Pole, and I thought I should balance the hemispheres by reading about a South Pole expedition.It would have been like watching "Titanic," "Poseidon," and then topping them off with movies of plane crashes before flying to one's cruise vacation. In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. With the coming of spring, the ice began to break apart and in doing so, it also crushed their ship. We are told from the beginning, that this is the unbelievable success story of how one man essentially saved the life of all his 27 crew members, so you're not left stressing about your favorite's demise coming just around the corner.