Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic

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To reach it, they had to crawl through athwartships bulkhead, and they could see that the bulkhead itself bulgedoutward as if it might burst at any moment, causing the whole forecastle tocollapse around them. The Framwas rather bowl-bottomed so that if the ice closed in against her she would besqueezed up and out of the pressure. But Endurance, his ship had subsequently been crushed and trapped by ice as they traversed the Weddell Sea.

In a very real sense he needed it—something so enormous, sodemanding, that it provided a touchstone for his monstrous ego andimplacable drive.of Lansing Archived October 1, 2006, at the Wayback Machine He also worked for the United Press International, Collier's Magazine, and the Reader's Digest. Her sides were made from oakand Norwegian mountain fir, and they varied in thickness from about 18inches to more than 2½ feet. Frequently she wasbarely able to push her way through, and sometimes she was stoppedaltogether, and had to heave to until the ice loosened. And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy.

Shackleton himself would command the actual transcontinental party,operating from the Weddell Sea side of the continent. In the rare periods of calm, when the movement of the pack subsided for a moment, the muffled rolling of drums drifted across the air. How and Bake-well rose from theirbunks, picked up two pillowcases in which they had stowed some personalgear, and followed Wild back up on deck. Moreover, the arrival of the Endurancewas an occasion at South Georgia; ordinarily there was very little in the wayof diversion at this southernmost outpost of civilization. At the same time a huge ship’s whistle blew, mingling with the crowing of roosters, the roar of a distant surf, the soft throb of an engine far away, and the moaning cries of an old woman.The northerly gale had compressedand crowded the whole Weddell Sea pack against the face of the land, and noforce on earth could open up the ice again—except another gale from theopposite direction. Two hours later there was a longer wire fromWinston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, stating that thegovernment desired the expedition to go on. He joined the British Merchant Navy at the age ofsixteen and though he rose steadily through the ranks, this sort of step-by-stepadvancement grew progressively less appealing to his flamboyant personality. We feel,” said Worsley, “as pleased as Balboa when, having burst throughthe forest of the Isthmus of Darien [Panama], he beheld the Pacific. The simple act of sailing hadcarried him beyond the world of reversals, frustrations, and inanities.

Also, there was the hoarse, rhythmic wash ofthe seas bursting against the graceful, undulating pack as it rode the steepswell. They set a course of south by east and ran at full speed for 100 carefreemiles through open water with whales sporting and blowing on all sides. Two or three times early in February they tried to free the ship when cracksdeveloped reasonably close to her, but these attempts failed completely. And in the space of a few short hours, life had been reduced from a highly complex existence, with a thousand petty problems, to one of the barest simplicity in which only one real task remained—the achievement of the goal. He had just tethered his dogs at thecamp when he was told to go with Wild to get some lumber out of the ship’sforehold.As he told it, he was ashore in London, staying at a hotel, when onenight he had a dream in which he pictured Burlington Street, in thefashionable West End section, as being filled with blocks of ice throughwhich he was navigating a ship. He wrote a book, and he went on a lecture tour which took him all over theBritish Isles, the United States, Canada, and much of Europe.

M. Almost immediately they realized that this was a different sort of ice fromanything encountered before. There was, infact, a notable lack of interest in the radio, primarily because it wasconsidered not only a novelty but an unserviceable one. Afterward there was a hearty songfest, with Hussey playing aone-stringed violin he had made himself. After a half-dozen leaps, the sea leopard had almost caught up with Orde-Lees when it unaccountably wheeled and plunged again into the water.

In all cases, however, the exact language, spelling, and punctuation have been preserved just as they were originally written. Members of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic ExpeditionSir Ernest Shackleton leaderFrank Wild second-in-commandFrank Worsley captainLionel Greenstreet first officerHubert T. In the rare periods of calm, when the movement of the packsubsided for a moment, the muffled rolling of drums drifted across the air. And even Fuchs,though his party was equipped with heated, tracked vehicles and powerfulradios, and guided by reconnaissance planes and dog teams, was stronglyurged to give up. During that time, though they couldn’t actually see the ice in motion, theywere altogether aware of what it was doing to the ship.