The Endurance

Continuing on my recent journey of reading books made into movies that I saw first, I finished reading The Endurance, by Alfred Lansing. I first watched the documentary (made in 2000), which Liam Neeson narrates, about Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated attempt in 1914 to be the first team to cross Antarctica. I was so moved by their experience that I wanted to read the book to learn more. I advise watching the movie first.

Not that I didn't love the book. It just helped to have the framework of events set up for you, before getting bogged down by the tedium of their life for so many months. So Shackleton, one of the most famous explorers of the era, posts a newspaper ad asking for men who aren't afraid of danger to cross the Antarctic with him. Over 2,000 men showed up. He picked twenty-six, plus himself and over 60 huskies for pulling sledges.

The group sets off at the dawn of WWI, and after getting to the area desired, get suddenly iced in less than a day's journey from land. Their huge, amazingly built boat gets literally caked in by ice floes. And so they sit for over 10 months, waiting and watching the ice for any signs of cracks to escape through. Finally they flee the ship when the floes literally crush the ship like a tin can. And this ship was three feet thick in most places.

So they live on the ice for another four and a half months. And this time life is harder. The ice begins to melt during this time, so their sleeping bags are in slush. They're walking in two feet deep slush. They're trying to get enough seal meat to survive. When the ice suddenly gets far enough apart to jump into the three rowboats without being crushed to death, they have a week of hard rowing through the most difficult seas on the planet.

They get to Elephant Island, land for once, but totally uninhabitable and never visited by whalers. So Shackleton picks 5 men to row one boat with him over 800 miles to South Georgia. It takes them two weeks, and is a harrowing experience. Once they make it, they're on the wrong side of the island and so he and two of the men walk across the glacier mountains in thirty-six hours to the whaling station for help.

I know this is long, but that's not all! Winter was setting in again and it took Shackleton several tries with various South American country's ships another four months to get close enough to Elephant Island to rescue his crew, should any of them have survived on the seal marrow water they were drinking. And did they? You'll have to watch or read to find out!!!

This book was only 250 pages and I think Lansing did a great job at recreating the emotions and physicallity of such an adventure. I keep thinking of those frozen men on the ice for so many months, searching for any sign of escape. And relating it to my life. It seems like most of them kept it together emotionally very well. I would have been thrashing around the edges of the floe every day stomping my feet that I had no control over saving my own life. But not these men. They were cut out for such an adventure. It broadened my perspective to say the least. Maybe when we're on our own personal floes that we can't control, we can learn from these strong men who crawled through miracle after miracle to survive. And that's what it was. A miracle.