Endurance Alfred Lansing. 1959, 353 pages

By 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton had assembled a crew of 27 handpicked men and financing for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition to cross Antarctica over the South Pole, from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, having already lost the honour of being the first person to reach the pole. When the Endurance became stuck in ice and broke up in the middle of the 900,000 square mile Weddell Sea, Shackleton’s supersized ego combined with sublime optimism and leadership ability kept the disparate crew together for epic treks across ice floes and stretches of rough open water to ultimate rescue, while suffering frostbite, near-starvation, despair, and more shipwrecks.

I first read this tale of adventure and courage in 2016, partly while flying to Ushuaia, and then tried to finish it while being tossed around on a small repurposed NOAA research vessel crossing the Drake Passage, ‘the most dreaded bit of ocean on the planet’, to Antarctica, admittedly not the most relaxing place to read about being stranded on Antarctic ice floes. I reread it this week and enjoyed it as much the second time, but with perhaps a bit more skepticism about the hyperbole and some detailed descriptions that seemed to incorporate a bit of literary licence.

Shackleton made several near-fatal decisions including refusal to take along adequate seal meat and blubber at one point, leading to the need to kill half of their sled dogs at one point and the rest of them to be eaten a little later, but he commanded loyalty from almost all the imperilled men and he possessed an acute sense of responsibility for their survival. At great personal risk, and with what seems like incredible good luck, he ultimately did get them all to safety. It is a testament to the very human survival instinct that the men seemed to bond together when needed, and seemed to even enjoy their adventure. Sitting on a cracking ice floe, cold and wet, running out of provisions, one man wrote in his diary “It has been a lovely day, and it is hard to think that we are in a precariously frightening position.” The navigation by sextant and compass will be of interest to those dedicated sailors in my coffee clutch but was very confusing to me.

The author writes with a keen sense of the dramatic suspense, though most readers already know the unlikely but lucky final outcome. The maps at the front of the book are helpful, but even with these, and having visited several of the sites mentioned, I found the geographic descriptions a bit confusing. But I fondly recall encounters with crab-eater, elephant, Weddell, and leopard seals, as well as Adele and Gentoo penguins that were all staples of the stranded crew’s diet.