Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

by Alfred Lansing

More than any other single impression in those final hours, all the men were struck, almost to the point of horror, by the way the ship behaved like a giant beast in its death agonies.

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.

“We feel,” said Worsley, “as pleased as Balboa when, having burst through the forest of the Isthmus of Darien [Panama], he beheld the Pacific.”

The Endurance was one microcosmic speck, 144 feet long and 25 feet wide, embedded in nearly one million square miles of ice that was slowly being rotated by the irresistible clockwise sweep of the winds and currents of the Weddell Sea.

The evening ended at midnight with a cold supper and a toast. Then everyone sang, “God Save the King.” And so the winter was half done.

“The rapidity with which one can completely change one’s ideas . . . and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful.”

And so they were alone. Now, in every direction, there was nothing to be seen but the endless ice. Their position was 68°38½´ South, 52°28´ West—a place where no man had ever been before, nor could they conceive that any man would ever want to be again.

This indomitable self-confidence of Shackleton’s took the form of optimism. And it worked in two ways: it set men’s souls on fire; as Macklin said, just to be in his presence was an experience. It was what made Shackleton so great a leader. But at the same time, the basic egotism that gave rise to his enormous self-reliance occasionally blinded him to realities. He tacitly expected those around him to reflect his own extreme optimism, and he could be almost petulant if they failed to do so. Such an attitude, he felt, cast doubt on him and his ability to lead them to safety.

Shackleton searched their faces for an answer to the question that troubled him most: How much more could they take? There was no single answer.

It was as if they had suddenly emerged into infinity. They had an ocean to themselves, a desolate, hostile vastness. Shackleton thought of the lines of Coleridge: Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea.

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.

Charles Darwin, on first seeing these waves breaking on Tierra del Fuego in 1833, wrote in his diary: “The sight . . . is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril and shipwreck.”

Here was a patched and battered 22-foot boat, daring to sail alone across the world’s most tempestuous sea, her rigging festooned with a threadbare collection of clothing and half-rotten sleeping bags. Her crew consisted of six men whose faces were black with caked soot and half-hidden by matted beards, whose bodies were dead white from constant soaking in salt water. In addition, their faces, and particularly their fingers were marked with ugly round patches of missing skin where frostbites had eaten into their flesh.

Though they had failed dismally even to come close to the expedition’s original objective, they knew now that somehow they had done much, much more than ever they set out to do.

When he saw the three men he stepped back and a look of disbelief came over his face. For a long moment he stood shocked and silent before he spoke. “Who the hell are you?” he said at last. The man in the center stepped forward. “My name is Shackleton,” he replied in a quiet voice. Again there was silence. Some said that Sørlle turned away and wept.