The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

by Caroline Alexander
The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

by Caroline Alexander

Hardcover(Revised)

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Overview

NATIONAL BEST SELLER A riveting account of Shackleton's famed Antarctic expedition, recounting one of the last great adventures in the Heroic Age of exploration—perhaps the greatest of them allthe shipwreck that stranded the crew for twenty months. Including never-before published photographs.

In August 1914, days before the outbreak of the First World War, the renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven set sail in their ship, Endurance, for the South Atlantic in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize in the history of exploration: the first crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent. Weaving a treacherous path through the freezing Weddell Sea, they had come within eighty-five miles of their destination when Endurance, was trapped fast in the ice pack. Soon the ship was crushed like matchwood, leaving the crew stranded on the floes. Their ordeal would last for twenty months, and they would make two near-fatal attempts to escape by open boat before their final rescue.

Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, Caroline Alexander gives us an enthralling account of Endurance and Shackleton's expedition—one of history's greatest epics of survival. And she presents the astonishing work of Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer whose visual record of the adventure has never before been published comprehensively. Together, text and image re-create the terrible beauty of Antarctica, the awful destruction of the ship, and the crew's heroic daily struggle to stay alive, a miracle achieved largely through Shackleton's inspiring leadership.

The survival of Hurley's remarkable images is scarcely less miraculous: The original glass plate negatives, from which most of the book's illustrations are superbly reproduced, were stored in hermetically sealed cannisters that survived months on the ice floes, a week in an open boat on the polar seas, and several more months buried in the snows of a rocky outcrop called Elephant Island. Finally Hurley was forced to abandon his professional equipment; he captured some of the most unforgettable images of the struggle with a pocket camera and three rolls of Kodak film.

Published in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural History's landmark exhibition on Shackleton's journey.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780375404030
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 11/03/1998
Edition description: Revised
Pages: 224
Sales rank: 73,755
Product dimensions: 8.50(w) x 9.44(h) x 0.87(d)
Lexile: 1180L (what's this?)

About the Author

Caroline Alexander has written for The New Yorker, Granta, Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian, Outside, and National Geographic, and is the author of four previous books. She is the curator of "Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Expedition," an exhibition that will open at the American Museum of Natural History in March 1999. She lives on a farm in New Hampshire.

Read an Excerpt

The captain of the ship, Frank Worsley, would remember the day vividly ever afterward. It was July, midwinter in Antarctica, and the darkness of the long polar night had been upon them for many weeks. The temperature was -30° Fahrenheit, and around the ship, extending to the horizon in all directions, was a sea of ice, white and mysterious under the clear, hard stars. From time to time, the shriek of the wind outside broke all conversation. Away in the distance, the ice would groan, and Worsley and his two companions would listen to its ominous voice as it travelled to them across the frozen miles. Sometimes, the little ship would quiver and groan in response, her wooden timbers straining as the pressure from millions of tons of ice, set in motion by some faraway disturbance, at last reached her resting place and nipped at her resilient sides. One of the three men spoke.

"She's pretty near her end. . . . The ship can't live in this, Skipper. You had better make up your mind that it is only a matter of time. It may be a few months, and it may be only a question of weeks, or even days . . . but what the ice gets, the ice keeps."



The year was 1915. The speaker was Sir Ernest Shackleton, one of the most renowned polar explorers of his day, and the third man was Frank Wild, his second-in-command. Their ship, Endurance, was trapped at latitude 74° south, deep in the frozen waters of Antarctica's Weddell Sea. Shackleton had been intent on an ambitious mission: He and his men had travelled to the south to claim one of the last remaining prizes in exploration, the crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent.

Since December 1914, the Endurance had battled unusually heavy ice conditions, travelling more than 1,000 miles from the remote whaling stations on the island of South Georgia, at the gateway to the Antarctic Circle. One hundred miles short of her intended harbor, new ice conditions brought the Endurance to a halt. A northeast gale blowing on and off for six straight days compressed the pack against the Antarctic ice shelf, trapping the ship fast within it. Days later, the temperature plummeted to 9°, as good as cementing the loose pack for the winter. Meanwhile, the leisurely, unrelenting northerly drift of the Weddell Sea carried the Endurance within the pack farther and farther from the land it had come so close to reaching.

When Shackleton embarked upon his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he was already a national hero with two polar expeditions behind him, including one that had taken him to within 100 miles of the South Pole, the farthest south anyone had travelled at that time. Yet for all the heroism of these earlier efforts, neither had accomplished what it had set out to do. By the time Shackleton headed south again in 1914, the prize of the South Pole, which he had twice sought, had been claimed by others. Undaunted, he had turned his sights upon a last great venture—the crossing of the Antarctic continent from the Weddell to the Ross Sea. The preparations for the Endurance expedition had been all-consuming; not the least of Shackleton's tasks had been raising the funds to make it possible. He was forty years of age, and he had summoned all his experience as explorer and organizer to bear on this ambitious undertaking. Shackleton could not yet know it, but the trans-Antarctic expedition would amount to another unsuccessful venture. Yet ultimately it would be for this, the failed Endurance expedition, that he would be most remembered.



Antarctic exploration of the early twentieth century was unlike exploration of anywhere else on earth. No dangerous beasts or savage natives barred the pioneering explorer's way. Here, with wind speeds up to nearly 200 miles an hour and temperatures as extreme as -100° Fahrenheit, the essential competitions were pure and uncomplicated, being between man and the unfettered force of raw Nature, and man and the limits of his own endurance. Antarctica was also unique in being a place that was genuinely discovered by its explorers. No indigenous peoples had been living there all along, and the men who set foot on the continent during this age could authentically claim to have been where no member of humankind had ever cast a shadow.

Beginning in 1914 and ending in 1917, straddling the First World War, the Endurance expedition is often said to have been the last in the Heroic Age of polar exploration. The significance and ambition of Shackleton's proposed trans-Antarctic crossing is best appreciated within a context of the ordeals of heroism—and egotism—that had played out before. Indeed, Shackleton's greatness as a leader on the Endurance owes much to the sometimes insane suffering of his earlier Antarctic experiences.

The Heroic Age began when the ship Discovery, under the command of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, set out for Antarctica's McMurdo Sound in August 1901. Despite public talk of scientific advancement, the real objective of this first inland expedition, as of subsequent ones, was to reach the as yet unclaimed South Pole and win it for Britain. Scott chose two men to accompany him on this first bid for the pole—Dr. Edward Wilson, a physician, zoologist, and close friend; and Lieutenant Ernest Shackleton, a twenty-eight-year-old merchant service officer, whose commissions had taken him to Africa and the East. On November 2, the three men set out with nineteen sledging dogs and five loaded sledges. They faced an unspeakably daunting challenge, a round-trip journey of more than 1,600 miles, hard sledging all the way, through an entirely unknown and uncharted environment.

By day, the three man-hauled their loads with or without the aid of the dogs, ferrying their supplies in time-consuming relays. By night they meticulously divided their meager food into three equal portions and read Darwin to one another before retiring to their frozen sleeping bags. They starved, they suffered from scurvy. The dogs sickened and dropped, and were butchered to feed the survivors. Scott pushed his band on to 82°17’ south, 745 miles north of the pole, before acknowledging their desperate situation and reluctantly giving the order to turn back. By this time, Shackleton was spitting blood, undone by scurvy, and sometimes had to be carried on the sledge. On February 3, 1903, three months after setting out, they arrived back at their ship. The last leg of this terrible journey had been a race for their very lives.

This first Antarctic trek established the pattern of heroic suffering that would characterize subsequent British expeditions. Yet even a casual perusal of the explorers' diaries suggests this suffering was unnecessary. Less than three weeks into their journey Wilson notes: "Dogs getting very tired and very slow (19 November). . . . The dogs made terribly heavy weather of it today, and the dog driving has become the most exasperating work (21 November). . . . Dogs very weary indeed and terribly slack and the driving of them has become a perfectly beastly business (24 November)." Day after day, one follows the downward spiral of these wretched, exhausted animals. It is unpleasant reading.

Scott's own diary sounds more alarms: "On the whole our ski so far have been of little value. . . . [T]he dogs, which have now become only a hindrance, were hitched on behind the sledges," Scott wrote on January 6, 1903. The following day he notes that they "dropped all the dogs out of the traces and pulled steadily ourselves for seven hours, covering ten good miles by sledge-meter. . . . [T]he animals walked pretty steadily alongside the sledges." It is a stunningly improbable image: Three men walking across Antarctica at about a mile an hour with their skis securely strapped to the sledges, accompanied by a pack of dogs. Scott and his companions had not taken the time to become proficient on skis, nor did they have any knowledge of driving dogs. Their prodigious difficulties, therefore, were the result of almost inconceivable incompetence, not necessity. And the men were starving—not because unforeseen disaster had taken their supplies, but because they had not rationed sufficient food. Shackleton, the biggest of the men, suffered the most because he required more fuel than did the others.

And they had quarrelled. Scott and Shackleton could not have been temperamentally more dissimilar and had virtually no rapport. As a product of the navy, Scott established a rigid order predicated upon rank and rules; on the Discovery, in the middle of the Antarctic, he put a man in irons for disobedience. Shackleton, an Anglo-Irishman from the ranks of the merchant marine, was charismatic, mixing easily with both crew and officers. He had been chosen to accompany Scott on account of his physical strength. The long days of white silence, the unrelenting tedium and hardship, the unrelieved close quarters—all these factors must have shredded the men's nerves. Wilson appears to have been forced to act as peacemaker on more than one occasion. Years later, Scott's second-in-command told the story that after breakfast one day Scott had called to the other men, "Come here, you bloody fools." Wilson asked if he was speaking to him, and Scott replied no. "Then it must have been me," said Shackleton. "Right, you're the worst bloody fool of the lot, and every time you dare to speak to me like that, you'll get it back." It is a surreal encounter, a piece of absurd theater—three men alone at the ends of the earth in a virtual whiteout, hissing at one another.

On their return to the Discovery, Scott invalided Shackleton home. Though mortified by his early return to England, Shackleton arrived home as a hero who had gone farther south than anyone before. And as the lone available authority on the expedition, he received more attention than would otherwise have been the case. This recognition, he must have known, would prove valuable should he one day wish to stage his own expedition. In any case, he would never again submit to the leadership of another man.

Interviews

On Wednesday, February 10th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Caroline Alexander to discuss THE ENDURANCE.


Moderator: Welcome, Caroline Alexander! Congratulations on the success of your New York Times bestseller THE ENDURANCE. Is this your first online chat?

Caroline Alexander: Yes, it is!


Greg from North Dakota: When did you first hear about Shackleton and the Endurance? Did you know immediately that it would make a fascinating book topic?

Caroline Alexander: I am American-English and had heard his name from my British parents. Then someone gave me a book about him, and I fell into it and starting reading obsessively every book that I could get my hands on. But then, no, I didn't think of doing a book at this point. I wrote a whimsical book on the ship's cat, called MRS. CHIPPY'S LAST EXPEDITION. But in researching Mrs. Chippy, I discovered an extraordinary collection of photos and realized they'd never been comprehensively exhibited. I worked on an exhibition for the Natural History Museum, and once that was in place, they asked for a book to accompany the exhibit, and that is how the book came to be. Now it seems very obvious, but it didn't at the time.


Andrew from Allentown, PA: Despite its heroic outcome, doesn't the absurdity of Shackleton's venture strike you? What drove these men to attempt the impossible?

Caroline Alexander: I am not so sure it was impossible. Remember, Shackleton had already gotten within 100 miles of the South Pole in 1909 and turned back again. What he was now attempting on the Endurance attempt was not much longer. And in this expedition he was to be helped by the fact that a relief party would lay depots on the opposite side of the continent. He would have been able to pick up fresh supplies on the other side. The depot party succeeded, so he would have been in good shape if he had gotten that far. I think all pioneering ventures of this type are both absurd and heroic. One could say that about flying to the moon or swimming the channel.


Lee from Toluene, California: Were you able to visit the Ross Sea in Antarctica or South Georgia Island during research for your book?

Caroline Alexander: The Ross Sea won't apply much to this story, but that is where the depot-laying party would have been. I actually would have returned from South Georgia yesterday, in an ideal world; there was a three-week cruise I had been invited to join, but I couldn't because of this exhibit. I have taken a pretty solemn vow that I will go this season.


Marcia from Austin, TX: How did surviving such a harrowing, near-death experience change Shackleton and his men? Often you hear survivors become more religious, change values, et cetera. Do their diaries reflect this?

Caroline Alexander: That is a good question. A handful of the diaries -- one man in particular, Ord-Lees -- definitely had a religious transformation. He converted to Catholicism on his return to civilization. The others in their unorthodox way were spiritual men in their way already. They had little patience for organized religion, but if you will, their private faith helped them. But they didn't rush home and join a congregation. The most remarkable thing to me is that when I interviewed the sons and daughters of these men, across the board they said, "My father didn't like to talk about this," much like war veterans. And they seemed to put the experience behind them and get on with their lives for the most part. There were some men who never quite recovered.


V. C. Lyod from Grand Rapids: What were the commercial factors in Shackleton's proposition to cross Antarctica? In your estimation, did the competitive factors outweigh these?

Caroline Alexander: Commercial factors were most represented by the presence of Frank Hurley onboard the Endurance. He was the official and a professional photographer, and Shackleton took him along because he had sold moving film and photograph rights for the expedition. It was an exclusive deal. However, I don't think Shackleton expected to make a bundle from this. The rights that were sold financed the expedition itself. The money went back into the project. I think that Shackleton was fueled by a very outdated, romantic idea of exploration. I think he had an almost poetic vision of himself questing to the ends of the earth.


Bryne from Aurora, CO: What was the most startling thing you discovered while writing THE ENDURANCE?

Caroline Alexander: A small detail to some people, but devastating to me: the discovery that the carpenter, Chippy McNish, had died destitute and broken on the docks in New Zealand. This was the man whose work had made the journey of the James Caird, their boat, possible. Shackleton denied McNish the polar medal when they returned to civilization. I think it is perhaps the only vindictive act Shackleton committed, and I can't forgive him for it.


Dennis Ginnard from Clinton Township, MI: Please compare the magnitude of the expedition and the hardships with those endured by those ascending Mount Everest and who die at a rate of 1 in 4.

Caroline Alexander: That is a loaded question! I think when you boil down the Everest tragedy, it comes down to one bad night on the mountain and the majority of the party fell apart. Shackleton's men endured at least nine months on the ice after their ship was crushed. But more to the point, with all respect to the sometimes quite valiant leaders on Everest, I think "Shackletonian" leadership would have saved all lives. We know from his own history that he had the courage to turn back from his goal, when he turned back 100 miles from the South Pole in 1909. I think if he had been leading the people up Everest, at the appointed turnaround hour, they would have turned back, period.


Suellen Miller from Chicago: Will Shackleton's Bible be one of the artifacts at the American Museum of Natural History show?

Caroline Alexander: Yes, and you can even see where the pages were torn from the book of Job.


Mannie from Pittsford, New York: Do you know if Shackleton and his crew hold the record for longest group survival with no deaths?

Caroline Alexander: Good question! I know of nothing comparable. That is to say, I know of remarkable survival stories, but they usually involve someone's loss of life along the way. So far, in the time I have been talking to and meeting people about this expedition, no one has brought to my attention anything that surpassed this.


David Bock from New York City, NY: Since the expedition had to ditch much of their equipment to make the boat journey, I imagine not all the film and photographic plates could be saved. How much of this material was lost?

Caroline Alexander: Hurley saved about a hundred glass-plate negatives. Over 400 were destroyed and left. But to my knowledge, the moving film he took survived intact. This film can be seen in two venues: Within the Museum of Natural History exhibition itself, we show excerpts on a screen to illustrate parts of the drama; and also the museum plans to show in its theater many public screenings of Hurley's film, which is now called "South."


Suellen Miller from Chicago: Why do you think there's such interest in Antarctic exploration? There's your book, all the reprints of Shackleton books, the Alfred Lansing book ENDURANCE, and the new study of Scott's Terra Nova trip?

Caroline Alexander: I think that there are two reasons: One, shrewd marketing -- when one book of the era does well, others are brought out to help make an event, if you will. But as to why the heroic age now, I think in great part it is a nostalgia for what we perceive as better generations. I think it has a lot to do with why Tom Brokaw's book THE GREATEST GENERATION or Peter Jennings's THE CENTURY [are so popular]. I think as we are on the eve of leaving the century we have all grown up in that there is a real wistful nostalgia for the age we are leaving behind, and Shackleton's story exemplifies many of these old-fashioned virtues that we know we have lost.


Mark from University of Pittsburgh: What other good books are there on Shackleton and the high-sea adventure? Which did you rely on the most? Can't wait to look at your book, Caroline. It sounds fascinating.

Caroline Alexander: Thank you, first of all! I would recommend Shackleton's own memoir, SOUTH, and Frank Worsley's ENDURANCE: AN EPIC OF POLAR ADVENTURE (Worsley was captain of the Endurance). And I highly recommend Roland Huntford's THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH. It was published in the 1970s. It is actually about Scott and Amundsen, but Shackleton figures in it largely. For my own research, I drew on unpublished sources, mostly, namely the diaries of the expedition members themselves. Alas, these aren't published.


Cordellia from Nicollsville, Kentucky: What is it about man-versus-nature stories that so appeal to human interest?

Caroline Alexander: I guess when the chips are down, it is the elemental struggle that somehow is the most inescapable or most daunting. I also think they are in some sense "pure" stories in a way that is not true in man's struggle against man. If we read stories of how concentration-camp survivors survived their ordeal, we are uplifted by their heroism, but the story is still a dirty one. These ethics of man against nature allow us to look at the best in man -- or worst, as the case may be -- with no degrading aspect to the heroism that ensues.


Brady from Fairfax, VA: It amazes me that all the crew survived! With such extreme cold, how did they not get hypothermia? What was the average temperature?

Caroline Alexander: I don't have an average temperature for the whole ordeal, but I do have month-by-month averages that are pretty interesting. The average temperature for their winter was minus 8.6 degrees in June, with the lowest temperature being minus 30 degrees. The highest average temperature for any one month was in the height of the southern summer, December, where the average temperature was 26 degrees Fahrenheit. Hypothermia? The more one knows about the story, the more you can't figure this out. Moreover, people with a lot more experience than I have in extreme environments are baffled and amazed and cannot explain it. Remember, too, that on at least two occasions the men were not just exposed to low temperatures but also to freezing water, which is much worse. In the two boat journeys they undertook, there was no waterproof clothing.


Tom from California: Do you find it somewhat ironic that big business is using Shackleton as a role model in the corporate world?

Caroline Alexander: Highly ironic! I keep hearing of this phenomenon, but I haven't yet witnessed it. Which is to say that people tell me he is being used as a role model in business, but I have yet to meet anyone who shows me how this is being done! I think a good case can be made for Shackleton's methods of human management being studied. His psychological gift of best handling his men was one of the strengths of his leadership.


Ronald from Newton, MA: Have you read the Andrea Barrett novel THE VOYAGE OF THE NARWHAL? I'm curious to get your thoughts on her novel.

Caroline Alexander: I haven't read a single novel in the past 14 months, but hers is high on my list. When the exhibition is over and I am free to read what I like again, I will be undoubtedly reading her book.


R. Lyons from Connecticut: Do you have a favorite photo of Hurley's in your book?

Caroline Alexander: Yes, and a quirky one. It is the photo that appears on the dedication page to Mrs. Chippy. It is a strangely haunting photograph to me. When I look at it, I know it is an old photo, and without knowing its context, I would have known it was taken onboard a ship. It is the photograph that first put me on the Shackleton trail, leading me to research the heroic life of Mrs. Chippy. (Mrs. Chippy was the ship's cat. Alas, she did not survive, but she did survive onboard the ten months they were trapped on the ice!)


Marissa from Seattle: Does Elephant Island -- where the crew launched -- still exist and go by the same name?

Caroline Alexander: Absolutely! I am working with Nova Productions on a documentary film about the Endurance expedition, and my partner just returned from Elephant Island. The documentary will be a two-hour feature documentary using location shooting on places like Elephant Island and South Georgia, as well as the very rich collection of contemporary photographs. It will be released in January of 2000. For people who really want to see Shackleton's environment up close, the same team is making an IMAX film to be released in autumn of 2000.


Paul from Morris Plains, NJ: Dear Caroline, I absolutely loved the pictures in this book. Can you tell me a little bit how you got all the pictures and what type of research you had to do for this book?

Caroline Alexander: The research for the photographs was very straightforward. All the images were in the possession of three institutions. They were not found in someone's attic or someone's bed; they had been there all the time, and for whatever reason no one had thought or bothered to showcase them. The research for the text was a different story and was conducted over two and a half years. Some firsthand source materials were in archives, some in record offices, and some in the possession of the families of the expedition members. Tracking these down often took a lot of sleuth work, but it was riveting work and, from my point of view, the best part of making this book.


Janene from Chicago: Are you available at any time during the exhibit?

Caroline Alexander: I will be giving a lecture on April 9th at the Museum of Natural History. This is the day before the exhibit opens to the general public.


Moderator: Thank you, Caroline Alexander! Best of luck with THE ENDURANCE. Do you have any closing comments for the online audience?

Caroline Alexander: I think that this is, I can say in all humility, a great story, and I hope you read it in my book, but if you read it in any book, you will be the better for it.


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