Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

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It's been pieced together from first hand accounts handed down through interviews with members of the crew and from diary entries (some of the crew kept diaries throughout the ordeal). If this was purely fiction, the reader would begin to accuse the author of embellishment, or downright melodramatic overkill. these boymen on the subway with their e-readers and their sculpted hair - what would happen to them, slapped on a boat on a moving glacier in the middle of nowhere, all frostbitten and without their cell phones - so cold that the fluid in their blisters turned to ice!

And it's not even close to what happened to Ernest Shackleton and his crew during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914. Narrated by Simon Prebble, it reads like the BBC Planet Earth documentaries, beautiful and riveting. Frank Worsley, captain of the Endurance, did a mind-boggling job of navigating first to Elephant Island and then on to South Georgia, using minimal equipment and water-logged charts, and compensating for frequent unintended changes in direction resulting from the 80 MPH winds that roared through the region. Alfred Lansing’s writing is first rate and the book’s structure is impeccable, especially toward the end where the author presents first the story of the 22 men on Elephant Island, and then relates what happened on the trip to South Georgia and the rescue efforts. Saving your own skin in a difficult situation could be admirable resourcefulness, but it's not the best illustration of heroism.When I saw the news about the HMS Endurance being found over 100 years after it sank in the Weddell Sea off of Antarctica, I was once again captured by this astonishing story of survival and human resilience. Pumping was barely able to keep pace, and with the next surge in pressure beams broke and decks buckled, and the rudder as torn free.

I am relieved that I didn't even know about this utterly harrowing tale of man's survival prior to my visit to Antarctica.

Shackleton and five others took the strongest boat into the dreaded Drake Passage in a desperate bid to find people and resources. A story that moves from ice to ocean to land, but never far from danger or the relentless "red alert" the nervous system endures for weeks and months on end.

a condition where grit and dirt from clothing (usually around the wrists) create small abrasions that become infected and cause severe pain if not treated. The South Pole had previously been discovered, but Shackleton hoped to lead an expedition from sea to sea.Once they reached King Haakon Bay, Shackleton and two others made the first confirmed land crossing of the South Georgia interior, arriving at the whaling station of Stromness. The author interviewed survivors of the ill-fated 1914 expedition to Antarctica and also used some of their diaries as his source material. After leaving the South Georgia Islands, Endurance entered the pack ice and for two weeks made its way through the ice. El Endurance fue encontrado en febrero de 2022 a tres mil metros de profundidad en el mar de Weddell en muy buenas condiciones.

Once he realised there was no chance of rescue, he and four crew mates sailed a further 600 miles across the southern ocean to South Georgia where they were shipwrecked. I may have sounded less than adulatory of Shackleton, but I'm aware of the mesmerizing lure of Antarctica. The expedition was unsuccessful, and instead of a grueling polar crossing, Shackleton and his men faced the horror of being locked in an ice flow for months on end; stranded on the ice when their ship, Endurance, was crushed and sank; and forced to launch out into a frigid, deadly sea to reach the closest landmass not once, but twice. Twenty-eight freezing, miserable, frostbitten, constipated, starving men who haven't had a bath in over a year, haven't seen the sun in months, packed together in close quarters -- it's not just amazing they survived, it's amazing they didn't kill and eat each other. There's some particularly chilling footage from Hurley where he actually captured the final death throes of The Endurance (after they'd emptied it).I had never heard of this before but this is a condition whereby normal people go bat-shitty bonkers when exposed to constant severe winds that simply.