Endurance is a thoroughly-researched, straightforward account of what happened. Despite the popularity Shackleton later earned as a leader, Lansing’s account does not lionize him. It, unfortunately, will not use up many of your stay-at-home days because you will finish it so fast. They had survived there four months.Įven though I knew how it would turn out, I could not put this book down. It took three attempts, due to ice, but Shackleton finally got a rescue ship through to Elephant Island, where he rescued all of the remaining 22 of his crew. A whaling boat was dispatched to rescue the three who stayed on the beach on the opposite side of South Georgia Island. Shackleton and four others crossed the mountainous island on foot. They barely survived the journey and had to settle for landing on the opposite side of the island from the whaling station. Shackleton and five others then sailed the sturdiest of the three boats over 800 miles to South Georgia Island and the whaling community of Stromness Bay. They were the first humans to set foot on the island. The boats delivered the crew to barren, storm-tortured Elephant Island. They drifted north on giant pieces of ice, hunting seals, sea leopards and penguins, until the floes broke up and they launched the three lifeboats they had salvaged from The Endurance. Shackleton and his crew of 27 bailed from the ship just days before it was crushed by ice floes in the Waddell Sea. The ship outfitted to get them to the first landing spot (the “get-there” boat) was christened The Endurance.īut, The Endurance never landed on the continent. The successful explorers would board the second boat for home. This time, he would land with a party of six men and 70 dogs on one side of the continent, while another ship would land on the opposite side and lay in supplies on the route on the back side of the pole.

In a previous expedition, Shackleton came within 97 miles of the pole before turning back due to a shortage of food. He planned to lead an expedition across the continent, right through the South Pole. Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition was green lighted in 1914 despite the outbreak of World War I. I read the book while locked down in prison (prison is my own fault, the lockdown courtesy of the coronavirus.) It is an odd but effective comfort to read about people surviving far worse than you are currently struggling with. Astronaut Mark Kelley recommended Alfred Lansing’s Endurance (1959) as a book to read to help get through the coronavirus shelter-in-place conditions (Time Magazine, May 2020.) The account of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition in 1914 is both a thrilling adventure story and a reminder that there are many things more difficult to survive than having to stay six feet apart from people we do not live with.

Alfred lansing