Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

by Alfred Lansing

a second ship would put into McMurdo Sound in the Ross Sea, almost directly across the continent from the Weddell Sea base. The Ross

Between expeditions, he also pursued this financial master-stroke. He was perennially entranced with new schemes, each of which in turn he was sure would win his fortune. It would be impossible to list them all, but they included an idea to manufacture cigarettes (a sure-fire plan—with his endorsement), a fleet of taxicabs, mining in Bulgaria, a whaling factory—even digging for buried treasure. Most of his ideas never got beyond the talking stage, and those that did were usually unsuccessful.

the great leaders of historical record—the Napoleons, the Nelsons, the Alexanders—have rarely fitted any conventional mold, and it is perhaps an injustice to evaluate them in ordinary terms.

tall, row-boned, plain-spoken Irishman whose long

two-year-old artist. Marston, a boyish-faced, chubby man, had

The reply was a one-word telegram: “Proceed.” Two hours later there was a longer wire from Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, stating that the government desired the expedition to go on.

barkentine—

she was the strongest wooden ship ever built in Norway—and probably anywhere else—with the possible exception of the Fram, the vessel used by Fridtjof Nansen, and later by Amundsen.

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

floe which had been jammed under the ship’s

And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances.

On November 4, Macklin wrote in his diary: “It has been a lovely day, and it is hard to think we are in a frightfully precarious situation.”

party and three of the dog teams to continue salvage

accompanied by another man,

a skilled

the tents

Taking the dogs down the gangway of the Endurance for

endeth another Christmas Day. I wonder how

to serve on board her had been terminated, and he was free to obey or not, as he chose.

Had he been a less excitable individual, he might have been able to cope with McNeish.

to aggravate McNeish’s resentment. Shackleton hurried

McNeish

aging and aching body that demanded rest. Even after Shackleton’s talk, he remained obstinate.

shall never forget him in this time of strain & stress.”

May the new one bring us good fortune, a safe

He was a man who believed completely in his own invincibility, and to whom defeat was a reflection of personal inadequacy.

Such an attitude, he felt, cast doubt on him and his ability to lead them to safety.

So similar to Steve Jobs

Stormy debates on the value of the dogs against the food they consumed broke out in each tent that night. But the fundamental, underlying factor in these discussions was that, for many men, the dogs were more than so many pounds of pulling power on the trail; there was a deep emotional attachment involved. It was the basic human need to love something, the desire to express tenderness in this barren place.

“great success.”

it.” Then on the morning of

had killed,

of the Adélies had removed, for the moment,

. We have been over 4 months on the floe—a time of absolute and utter inutility to anyone. There is absolutely nothing to do but kill time as best one may. Even at home, with theatres and all sorts of amusements, changes of scene and people, four months idleness would be tedious: One can then imagine how much worse it is for us. One looks forward to meals, not for what one will get, but as definite breaks in the day. All around us we have day after day the same unbroken whiteness, unrelieved by anything at all.”

Shackleton’s

In fifteen minutes, Patience Camp was lost in the confusion of ice astern. But Patience Camp no longer mattered. That soot-blackened floe which had been their prison for nearly four months—whose every feature they knew so well, as convicts know each crevice of their cells; which they had come to despise, but whose preservation they had prayed for so often—belonged now to the past. They were in the boats . . . actually in the boats, and that was all that mattered. They thought neither of Patience Camp nor of an hour hence. There was only the present, and that meant row . . . get away . . . escape.