The crew faced danger after danger and were pushed to the very limits of human endurance, and yet banded together to pull off an incredible feat of survival in one of the most remote and inhospitable regions on Planet Earth. Without spoiling any of the details of what happened, the story of the Endurance is one of the most astonishing and inspirational survival sagas in history. Before reading this book, I didn’t know much about the ship or indeed Shackleton, but what a story it is! I was inspired to buy this book after seeing news reports on the recently-discovered wreck of the Endurance. It would have been helpful to have had a postscript describing what happened to the survivors. It is not that kind of book, more a daring boys’-own tale than an examination of what must have been a psychological trauma. The importance of Shackleton in maintaining morale and finding a route out is obvious, but there is no feeling of the man, or even of his intrepid comrades. Given that the first part of the tale is about hanging around on the ice suffering from constipation (too much seal meat, apparently), then the second part clinging to small boats in heavy seas, suffering from frostbite and sea boils, the tale is well told. The gripping story is reconstructed from the survivors’ diaries and ships logs. Within three months all of the crew members had been rescued. However, to reach civilization, Shackleton and two others still had to cross a perilous icy mountain range. Shackleton and a small crew then sailed one of the boats across the 650 miles across the treacherous Drake Passage to South Georgia island, where a whaling station was located. Using three small boats from the Endurance, the crew took to the sea and found temporary safety on a small island. Eventually they had to slaughter and eat the dogs. The crew had to camp on the ice for a year, gradually drifting northwards and subsisting on sled rations, seals and puffins. The company ran into trouble almost right away when their ship ‘Endurance’ became stranded in pack ice just off the coast and was subsequently smashed by the moving ice flows. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, gung-ho polar hero Sir Ernest Shackleton led a possibly foolhardy expedition to cross the Antarctic continent by dog sled. This utterly gripping book, based on firsthand accounts of crew members and interviews with survivors, describes how the men survived, how they lived together in camps on the ice for 17 months until they reached land, how they were attacked by sea leopards, had to kill their beloved dogs whom they could no longer feed, the diseases which they developed (an operation to amputate the foot of one member of the crew was carried out on the ice), and the extraordinary indefatigability of the men and their lasting civility towards one another in the most adverse conditions conceivable.Ī very British story of heroic failure that turned out to be a triumph of leadership and fortitude. For five months Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways on one of the most savage regions of the world. In October 1915, still half a continent away from their intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in ice. The object of the expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland. In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men set sail for the South Atlantic on board a ship called the Endurance.
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