Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

by Alfred Lansing

For scientific leadership give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

Often during this period, the phenomenon of an “ice shower,” caused by the moisture in the air freezing and settling to earth, lent a fairyland atmosphere to the scene. Millions of delicate crystals, frequently thin and needlelike in shape, descended in sparkling beauty through the twilight air.

The Endurance was beset. As Orde-Lees, the storekeeper, put it, “frozen, like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar.”

“Today seems to be particularly monotonous, and the wild magnificence of the precipitous cliffs that limit us to the circumscribed confines of Cape Wild loom through the mist like prison walls, sinister and inaccessible. If there were only some duties, useful or otherwise, to be performed, the burden of time would be more pleasant and at present our sole exercise is to promenade up and down the 80 yards of the spit, or climb to the lookout and scan the misty skyline for a mast. We look forward anxiously to the forthcoming month, when relief is anticipated. One grows weary of continually estimating the days from the ‘Caird’s’ departure to the hoped for arrival of the [relief ship].”

He had demonstrated there beyond all doubt his ability to pit his matchless tenacity against the elements—and win. But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe—and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone.

Shortly after noon, as if from nowhere, a magnificent wandering albatross appeared overhead. In contrast to the Caird, it soared with an ease and grace that was poetic, riding the gale on wings that never moved, sometimes dropping to within 10 feet of the boat, then rising almost vertically on the wind, a hundred, two hundred feet, only to plunge downward again in a beautifully effortless sweep. It was perhaps one of nature’s ironies. Here was her largest and most incomparable creature capable of flight, whose wingspread exceeded 11 feet from tip to tip, and to whom the most violent storm was meaningless, sent to accompany the Caird, as if in mockery of her painful struggles. Hour after hour the albatross circled overhead, and there was an elegance of motion to the bird’s flight that was very nearly hypnotic. The men could hardly avoid a feeling of envy.

But sufficiently provoked, there is hardly a creature on God’s earth that ultimately won’t turn and attempt to fight, regardless of the odds.