Endurance is, with good reason, regarded as the definitive book about Shackleton’s doomed 1915 Antarctic expedition. Written in 1959 by journalist Alfred Lansing, the book draws heavily on expedition members’ diaries and personal interviews with survivors. The crew members’ camaraderie and conflicts are richly drawn, creating a three-dimensional world that goes way beyond the typical blow-by-blow polar survival narrative (“Day 34: we were each allotted 3 ounces of sledging rations; Butterfield lost another toe.”) Blizzards, frostbite, and leopard seal attacks add drama to an increasing sense of foreboding as the men lose their ship and are forced to camp on the shifting pack ice. Lansing conveys the crushing anxiety Shackleton felt as he desperately tried to both keep his men alive and find a way back to civilization. Obsessed with fear that he would lose control of his men, Shackleton separated troublemakers and worked nonstop to boost morale with small celebrations and treats. The rescue team’s harrowing 800-mile journey through the storm-tossed Weddell Sea in an open rowboat is riveting, as is Shackleton’s final trek over the icy peaks of South Georgia Island to reach a whaling station. And of course, what makes the whole tale so miraculous (and Shackleton so famous) is that every one of the crew members survived.
Die-hard Shackleton fans will relish F. A. Worsley’s Shackleton’s Boat Journey: The Narrative from the Captain of the Endurance. Written by the captain of the Endurance, the book offers the most gripping account in print of the expedition’s final, harrowing push for civilization. When Shackleton sets out to find civilization with Worsley and a few others, It is thanks to Worsley’s navigational savvy that their 22-foot craft survives its final perilous journey across the Weddell Sea. On each rare occasion that the sun appears, Worsley kneels in the bucking boat with two men bracing him on either side, takes a reading with his sextant, and jots his findings in water-logged notebooks with frostbitten fingers. His account of the team’s exhausting march over unnamed mountains in search of a whaling station—with just a bit a rope, a few screws fixed into their rotting shoes, and the last drops of their camp fuel to aid them—is equally mesmerizing. Despite the tremendous physical hardships of the journey, Worsley describes Shackleton’s men as irrepressible jokesters who find a way to laugh even when doom seems imminent.
What was going on in the mind of Shackleton himself during the ill-fated expedition? Find out in his memoir of the event, South. Shackleton had planned to write a book about the expedition as part of his marketing and fundraising campaign. Instead of victoriously describing a successful polar adventure, Shackleton finds himself chronicling his efforts to keep his crew alive and find a way back to civilization. This book is an infinitely more fun way to find out what makes a great leader than most of the self-help leadership books on the market today. As Worsley observed, Shackleton’s greatest failure became his greatest achievement.
One of the things that makes Shackleton’s expedition so unforgettable is the treasure-trove of documentation about the trip. Many of the crew members kept journals, and Australian Frank Hurley, the ship’s photographer, recorded the adventure with film and starkly beautiful black and white photographs. In her lovely book The Endurance, Caroline Alexander mines the depths of crew members’ journals and weaves a narrative about the expedition together with more than 150 of Hurley’s photographs. Hurley was a gifted photographer and captured both the grandeur of the austere polar world and the small joys of camp life for the ship’s men. Alexander wrote another book about the expedition, Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition: The Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-Bound Cat. Drawing heavily from crew members’ journals, this humorous tale is told from the perspective of the ship’s cat, who belonged to the talented expedition carpenter, Chippy McNeish. Sadly, unlike the human members of the team, Mrs. Chippy does not survive the ordeal.
Reviews by Kali.
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