"Endurance" by Alfred Lansing

It is a saving grace in these days of stay-at-home orders to be able to travel the world in books.  A good destination is Antarctica, probably our least explored continent.  We know what we know because of the men of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.  I have the journals of James Cook in my to-read pile, the man who started the age.  As for Richard Byrd, one of the latter explorers, I have already read his book, Alone.  Now I come to Irishman Ernest Shackleton and the voyage of Endurance, which also is the title of the book written about him by Alfred Lansing (Basic Books, 2014).

Shackleton’s good ship Endurance becomes frozen in ice on the Weddell Sea during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917.  Day and night the ice closes in around the ship, finally crushing it with overwhelming pressure.  The crew is forced to abandon the ship and move to a number of ice floes to camp and wait for the winter darkness to end.  They realize that it is up to them to save themselves, so they begin a migration northward, often in response to splits and crevasses developing in the ice floes.  It is a perilous journey, but Shackleton distinguishes himself as a “boss” of the highest order, a supreme leader of men in desperate situations.  He does not separate himself; he joins in and becomes a fully active crew member helping to free them from an almost certain death.

The story peaks with Shackleton and a small crew setting off in an open boat for the islands to the north, a journey that should never have been successful, yet, miraculously, is just that.  First on the sea and then overland, Shackleton never loses sight of the goal to get back to civilization and mount a rescue mission to save the men he had to leave behind.

Lansing writes descriptively of both the man and his continent:  “In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night.  It is a return to the Ice Age—no warmth, no life, no movement.  Only those who have experienced it can fully appreciate what it means to be without the sun day after day and week after week.  Few men unaccustomed to it can fight off its effects altogether and it has driven some men mad.”  Shackleton is clearly drawn to this austere and desolate landscape.  His men have an obsession for it as well; many from the Endurance expedition signed on for Shackleton’s next exploration even though they had not been fully paid for their work on that disastrous previous mission.

Lansing also does not flinch from the brutality of life on the ice.  The men suffer chronic constipation due to their all-meat diet.  Once the stores of food are exhausted, the crew is forced to scrounge for a meal wherever they can find it.  The most available sources were penguins and seals.  “Killing the seal was a bloody business,” Lansing writes.  “…the men killed the seals by hand whenever possible.  This involved approaching the animal cautiously, then stunning it across the nose with a ski or a broken oar and cutting its jugular vein so that it bled to death…Another technique was to brain the seal with a pickaxe.  But the two surgeons discouraged this practice, for it often left the brains inedible and they were prized as food because they were believed to be high in vitamin content.”

The men suffer frostbite and other injuries, and one even has a heart attack, a prophetic development mirroring Shackleton’s death on his final expedition.  Lansing describes a gut-wrenching scene when the ship’s surgeon must amputate the feet of a crew member.  Under limited anesthesia and in primitive conditions, the man survives and his life is saved from the encroaching gangrene.

Shackleton was part of four expeditions in his lifetime, three of which he was leader.  The final one, the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition, cost him his life only as it just got underway.  He was only 47 years old.  With his wife’s permission, he was buried on South Georgia, an island where he had spent many of his Antarctic days.

Endurance is a powerful adventure story.  Human beings in history have always relentlessly explored their world despite the inherent dangers.  This impetus has lead us to the moon, and will someday lead us far beyond to the stars, no doubt.  Men and women like Ernest Shackleton can draw on his moral leadership, his desire to achieve, his push to expand the horizon for all human beings.  He is a hero in the true and traditional sense of the word, an explorer and a pioneer.