Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage on amazon.com
Endurance: Shackelton's Incredible Voyage, Alred Lansing, Carroll & Graf Publishers, NY, 1959 (2nd Ed., 1999)
Reader Rating: 10/10
This was a gripping read pretty much cover to cover, as it starts off with Shackelton's ship Endurance being trapped in the ice floes of the frozen Weddell Sea off the northern Antarctic coast and abandoned. Imagine being 1,200 miles from ANYWHERE--on ice floes that are 8-10 feet thick--knowing that NO ONE knows where you are or what has happened to you and your crew of 22 men! No radio contact, no planes coming to check on your position...you are literally ON YOUR OWN! The proverbial "between a rock and a hard place" doesn't do justice to this kind of predicament.
Shackelton and the crew of his ship Endurance had left that last outpost of humanity--the whaling station on South Georgia Island--on Dec 5, 1914, and finally abandoned ship on Oct 27, 1915. That was after being first held fast in the ice pack while within sight of the northern Antarctic coast since Jan 19, 1915 (from which they steadily drifted away from)! Shackelton and his 27 men thereafter drifted in a northerly direction on the ice pack until Apr 9, 1916, when they took to the 3 life boats they had kept from the Endurance. After a treacherous week-long voyage, they finally all made it to a little frozen spit of land on Elephant Island (it had been 497 days since they were on land!).
From there, on Apr 24, 1916, Shackelton and a crew of five set off in one of the slightly modified 22-foot life boats to reach the whaling station on South Georgia Island some 870 miles away--across the dreaded Drake Passage off Cape Horn, in the face of the roughest, most inhospitable seas & weather in the world!! As the U.S. Navy's Sailing Direction for Antarctica states about the winds: "They are often of hurricane intensity and with gust velocity sometimes attaining to 150 to 200 miles per hour. Winds of such violence are not known elsewhere, save perhaps within a tropical cyclone." (!) The waves in this area--termed Cape Horn "Rollers"--can extend more than a mile from crest to crest (aaaaaahhhh!), and can reach heights exceeding 80 - 90 ft (aaaaaahhhh!). Temperatures dropped below zero so that water at one point froze all along the top of the boat, threatening to sink it. And the only way to navigate was using their one sexton which required sighting the angle of the sun against the horizon (not easy to do when a gale force is blowing & it's snowing!!)...
After being forced to land on the opposite side of South Georgia from the whaling station's location (on May 10, 1916), Shackelton & 2 of the skeleton crew completed another feat NO ONE had ever done before (& only 1x since, 40 years later!)--they crossed the 10,000+ ft snow/ice-bound mountain ranges on foot with no tent/sleeping bags, wandering like frozen ghosts into the whaling station...May 20, 1916...Due to the winter ice pack and troubles getting an appropriate ice-cutting vessel (after repeated futile attempts in innappropriate vessels), it wasn't until Aug 30, 1916 that Shackelton was finally able to rescue the 22 men he had left on Elephant Island nearly 4 months before! But every member of his crew had been rescued.
Well, as you can imagine, it takes an amazing kind of leader to accomplish a feat like that, seeing his crew through a series of predicaments as perilous as he did. The Wall Street Journal's review of the voyage called it: "Grit in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity." I'll say--man, incredible odds, impossible hurdles! And most of it all at sub-zero temperatures, being wet and desperately hungry! It would have been easy to give up along the way--but Shackelton continually rallied his men to keep their discipline and stick to the basics of survival.
A good read and very inspirational. I've ordered
All for now--wes
******************************************
"If you're not standing on the edge,
you're taking up too much room."
******************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment