Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
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Book Reviews of Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
Book Review: "Man proposes [God disposes]" ---diary entry
Summary: 5 Stars
Endurance by Alfred Lansing was first published in 1959. The copy I have is a 26th printing which indicates how popular this book has been. It is an adventure story that is entirely historical. It covers the 1914/15 attempt of explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 to be the first to cross the Antarctic continent overland west to east. This goal was interrupted for good when their ship, the Endurance, became trapped in ice in the Weddell Sea. The call for adventure soon became a constant struggle for survival that lasted ten months. The crew set up camp on various ice floes only to be forced to move when the dreaded cracks appeared. Their progress towards land is controlled by the direction and force of the gales. Conditions change almost daily in the chaotic and brutal Antarctic climate. When the ice floes were no longer an option, the crew set out in three small boats taken on the voyage hoping to find land. Once land was found, the crew split up as six members took one of the small boats into the dreaded Drake Passage in the hopes of finding help. Both groups were in danger of not surviving the unforgiving environment.
Lansing bases his work on interviews with survivors and the waterlogged diaries several of them kept. He is thus able to provide the reader with details of the crew's day-to-day life. Everything from the personalities of various members to their diets, clothing, attempts at building shelters, etc. are described. I do not have knowledge of seafaring vocabulary or conditions, but Lansing is able to describe such things as the pressure caused by broken floes of ice (p.47) in a clear manner. As an historical event, this story needs no poetic license. It is one of the most suspenseful history books I have read. Just when things looked good for the crew, the tide turned and vice versa. After reading what all these 28 men went through, the ending, although surprisingly brief, was very moving.
The only part of the book that disappointed me was the ending. I wanted to know what happened to some of the main characters after their ordeal. The epilogue just covers the attempt to rescue the 22 members left on Elephant Island and goes no further. It seemed unfair to leave the story like that. Despite this shortcoming, I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in historical adventure. It is one of the best books of that ilk one will read. One interesting note: Shackleton's goal was not achieved until 1958, 40 years after Shackleton set out on the Endurance and a year before this book was first published. It is 282 pages and includes a short section of b&w photos and illustrations.
Book Review: Shackleton's Incredable Voyage
Summary: 5 Stars
Shackleton's Voyage by Donald Barr Chidsey is the most dramatic tale of survival against all odds that I have read since Gary Paulsen's Hatchet. The thing that fascinated me most in this book was the fact that after Shackleton had failed on his first attempt to discover the South Pole, he proceeded to try again, some six years later, with a crew of 26, aboard the greatest ship of the time, the Endurance. It fascinated me because I couldn't understand why, after seeing the devastation and hardships that could, and would be faced, he would do it again. The best part of the story occurs in the last 30 pages or so, when Shackleton decides the only way they will ever make it out alive is by walking out of their own icy tomb. There's a quote in this section that I especially liked, where things finally turn around. It is the last paragraph, on page 161. "Why not? Somebody had to go and get help. The men might survive a winter on this highly inhospitable island, but with the coming of spring in September, they could not reasonably hope to be spotted and rescued by some stray whaler. So they would have to go and get their own help; and the person to do that, obviously, was Earnest Henry Shackleton. They were his boys weren't they?" I was mesmerized by this quote, because it shows that these explorers were finally taking things into their own hands.The theme of this story is that no matter how bad things are, you should never give up hope. The commitment to hope, to overcoming what seems impossible, is something that I feel very strongly about because it is a decision to always push forward, to go on with life, to not surrender. The only thing that these stranded men had left was hope, and with no safe shelter, inadequate clothing, nothing but pemmican to eat day after day, and sheer, unbearable boredom, hope was the only thing they had left. With things going so horribly, if they gave up hope, they might as well have given up their lives. This theme relates to me, being the eternal optimist that I am, because I hold hope close to my heart. As an optimist, and also an athlete and a person with a learning disability, I have found over and over again, that it is the belief that things can always be better that keeps you in the game of life. Without hope that belief would be gone.
This is a book well worth the read. It is an exciting and intriguing adventure that introduces you to the early exploration of the Antarctic. It is an awesome adventure where 26 ordinary men battle the elements and themselves . I recommend this book so strongly because it's one that even if you're not an explorer you would like to imagine yourself as one.
Book Review: Shackleton's Voyage
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is about the English explorer and his crew of 28 surviving in the Antartic and finding his way back. They Planned on sailing to Antartica by the Endurence, A wooden ship originally named Polaris,but changed to fit Shackleton's family motto of endurence. From there they would cross the contient with a 6 man sled team with their dogs. They did not accompolish this goal. Their ship was trapped in the Wedell Sea in an ice flow. For the longest time they couldn't get free. Finally they got free, and when they did, they were trapped between about three flows. It put enormus preasure on the ship and left them waiting for a southern gale. It never came. They finnaly had to abandon the ship that would later be completly submerged. They had to go on foot in the direction of South Georgia Island. With them, they dragged the three life boats, hoping to come across open water. Several times they could not go on because the ice was too thin. When they reached water only about 5 men could go because two of the ships were needed to streghthen the strongest one. Then they came to another stopping point and only three men could go on. They were Crean,Wild,and Shackleton. They had to cross the Island that I think is Elephant Island. No one had done it before, the land was too treacherous,but they had to be quick and therefore they couldn't go around. They made it not one of the crew dyed during the Antartic journey that lasted over a year.This voyage had actually brought the men together, though there were disagreements. The author told about most of the crew in detail. They had good traits and bad. The crew was strong and they still recorded in their journals comments such as what a nice day it was. They wanted very much to go home,but they still had grown more used to this way of life. One man actually recorded in his diary that he liked the roughness of his new
life.They also survived the Antartic Winter which had no sun. Many would have gone crazy as previous men had done on somewhat similar expeditons. Shackleton was careful to prevent fights among the men. One thing he feared was the spread of depression and hopelessness from one member to the whole crew. If this happened the crew wouldn't work as hard or they might totally give up, but this didn't happen and every one supported each other to get back home.
I recommend this book to everyone. It is a great story about a struggle against nature.
Book Review: How did they do it? you wouldn't believe it as a movie.
Summary: 5 Stars
If ever a ship was aptly named, it was the Endurance!I sat up til 2 in the morning to finish this book, I just had to do it. I wish I could give it seven stars.
Any single part of the crew's journey would have merited being a major achievement of survival in any age, but they strung together a year on the ice, then dragging their boats across the frozen flows, sailing to Elephant Island as the ice broke up, a party then sailing over 1000 km to South Georgia (through a major storm in an open boat) largely through dead reckoning, being able to take only three or fourth sightings, landing on the wrong side of the island and then marching across to raise the alarm. Incidentally, as I read the account of the crossing of the island (albeit at 1.30 am) I had the impression that it was all a bit of a stroll in the park compared with what they had been through previously,
.... and yet, they had only 18 month old fur suits, minimal food and a few lengths of rope,........and yet they had been on small boats in freezing weather for months ....and yet they made the first crossin of the Island, which was not crossed again until the 50's, by a fully equipped team of mountaineers and no-one has managed the crossing in a shorter time than they managed...... and yet less than a day after they crossed a blizzard came in from the Antarctic that would have killed them in the open... and then later I saw photos of the "park" they strolled!! ice covered crevasses, sheer cliffs and icewalls....
It then took months and four attempts to rescue the remainder of the crew on Elephant Island. And Shackleton did not relax until he had retrieved the rest of his crew, all alive and largely well (one had had a frostbitten foot successfully amputated, using only a little chloroform and a scalpel), nearly six months after he set off for South Georgia.
Read this book, you will not be disappointed> It will give you a sense of perspective and reality, as you fume in traffic or about the dropkick at the other end of the phone. When an athlete or celebrity, politician or other minor achiever is cited as someone or other's hero, you can think about a real hero who provided indefatigable leadership under the most trying circumstance for nearly 2 years, and who brought his whole crew back alive, who showed courage and never, ever gave up; Sir Earnest Shackleton.
Book Review: An Antidote for the Age of Whining and Self-Absorption
Summary: 5 Stars
Everything that defines courage and leadership for our age and any other is within the 280 pages of this wonderful book. For nearly two years, in conditions of constant zero and below cold, freezing wet, and often hunger, Ernest Shackleton kept all 27 men who sailed with him on the Endurance alive to eventually return to the England they left on the verge of World War I. That single-minded devotion to his men should make this book required reading for every would-be politician and corporate executive before he dares ask for the faith, trust and respect of those he would lead. Lansing dedicated the book "In appreciation for whatever it is that makes men accomplish the impossible." He wisely and without flourish often lets the men's own words -- through the journals that many of them kept at the time and in interviews forty years later -- tell their extraordinary story, each stage of which reads more harrowing than the last. On an expedition that would have attempted to cross the Antarctic on foot (a feat not accomplished until four decades later), the Endurance is trapped in pack ice before it can reach shore. Shackleton's perhaps foolhardy original goal thus turns to keeping his men alive until they can be rescued. After ten months locked in the drifting pack, the Endurance is crushed and the men forced to abandon her for an ice floe, then several weeks later a smaller floe still. Eventually they take to three boats to reach forlorn Elephant Island from which Shackleton takes a skeleton crew of five and in a 22 foot open boat navigates the enormous seas of Drake's Passage to South Ascension Island. Once there he only (only!) has uncharted glaciers to cross to reach the whaling station on the other side of the island from which rescue of the Elephant Island castaways is eventually launched. The only other crossing of South Georgian Island by foot at the time Lansing wrote in 1959 occurred on a "easier" route with equipment and time. Shackleton had neither, only a fifty foot piece of rope, a carpenter's adze, and the knowledge that to stop moving was to invite death by freezing. At journey's end, to the astonished manager of the whaling factory, he says simply, "My name is Shackleton." I would have liked to have known him and all his men.