Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

by Alfred Lansing

From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed.

No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.

But no more. They were even at this moment less than 250 miles from the nearest point on South Georgia. And having already covered 450 miles, the distance that remained was at least conceivable. Three days more, or maybe four at the most, should see them there, and then it would all be over. And so that peculiar brand of anxiety, born of an impossible goal that somehow comes within reach, began to infect them. Nothing overt, really, just a sort of added awareness, a little more caution and more care to insure that nothing preventable should go wrong now.

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. In an unspoken sense, that was much the way they felt now. They were possessed by an angry determination to see the journey through—no matter what. They felt that they had earned it. For thirteen days they had absorbed everything that the Drake Passage could throw at them—and now, by God, they deserved to make it.

“I do not know how they did it, except that they had to—three men of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration with 50 feet of rope between them—and a carpenter’s adze.”