Endurance Alfred Lansing Quotes

No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.

In that instant they felt an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment. Though they had failed dismally even to come close to the expedition's original objective, they knew now that somehow they had done much, much more than ever they set out to do.

Of all their enemies -- the cold, the ice, the sea -- he feared none more than demoralization.

Fortitudine vincimus—“By endurance we conquer.

Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.

For scientific leadership give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

Whatever his mood—whether it was gay and breezy, or dark with rage—he had one pervading characteristic: he was purposeful.

The rapidity with which one can completely change one’s ideas . . . and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful.

In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the Ice Age— no warmth, no life, no movement. Only those who have experienced it can fully appreciate what it means to be without the sun day after day and week after week. Few men unaccustomed to it can fight off its effects altogether, and it has driven some men mad.

He promised to write a book later about the trip. He sold the rights to the motion pictures and still photographs that would be taken, and he agreed to give a long lecture series on his return. In all these arrangments, there was one basic assumption - that Shackleton would survive.

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.

But the dawn did come—at last.

I long for some rest, free from thought.

The whole undertaking was criticized in some circles as being too "audacious." And perhaps it was. But if it hadn't been audacious, it wouldn't have been to Shackleton's liking. He was, above all, an explorer in the classic mold—utterly self-reliant, romantic, and just a little swashbuckling.

This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe—and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone. The results are impressive.

be made of the wind’s actual speed,

And all the defenses they had so carefully constructed to prevent hope from entering their minds collapsed.

They thought of home, naturally, but there was no burning desire to be in civilization for its own sake. Worsley recorded: "Waking on a fine morning I feel a great longing for the smell of dewy wet grass and flowers of a Spring morning in New Zealand or England. One has very few other longings for civilization—good bread and butter, Munich beer, Coromandel rock oysters, apple pie and Devonshire cream are pleasant reminiscences rather than longings.

This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe—and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone. The

They had been the underdog, fit only to endure the punishment inflicted on them. But sufficiently provoked, there is hardly a creature on God’s earth that ultimately won’t turn and attempt to fight, regardless of the odds.

A forbidding-looking place, certainly, but that only made it seem the more pitiful. It was the refuge of twenty-two men who, at that very moment, were camped on a precarious, storm-washed spit of beach, as helpless and isolated from the outside world as if they were on another planet. Their plight was known only to the six men in this ridiculously little boat, whose responsibility now was to prove that all the laws of chance were wrong—and return with help. It was a staggering trust.

Then he opened the Bible Queen Alexandra had given them and ripped out the flyleaf and the page containing the Twenty-third Psalm. He also tore out the page from the Book of Job with this verse on it: Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone. And the face of the deep is frozen. The he laid the Bible in the snow and walked away. It was a dramatic gesture, but that was the way Shackleton wanted it. From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed.

Lat. 65°43' South—73 miles North drift. The most cheerful

Even at home, with theatres and all sorts of amusements, changes of scene and people, four months idleness would be tedious: One can then imagine how much worse it is for us.

It was as if they had suddenly emerged into infinity. They had an ocean to themselves, a desolate, hostile vastness. Shackleton thought of the lines of Coleridge: Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea.

They looked up against the darkening sky and saw the fog curling over the edge of the ridges, perhaps 2,000 feet above them—and they felt that special kind of pride of a person who in a foolish moment accepts an impossible dare—then pulls it off to perfection.

It was now light twenty-four hours a day; the sun disappeared only briefly near midnight, leaving prolonged, magnificent twilight. Often during this period, the phenomenon of an “ice shower,” caused by the moisture in the air freezing and settling to earth, lent a fairyland atmosphere to the scene.

They were for all practical purposes alone in the frozen Antarctic seas. It had been very nearly a year since they had last been in contact with civilization. Nobody in the outside world knew they were in trouble, much less where they were. They had no radio transmitter with which to notify any would-be rescuers, and it is doubtful that any rescuers could have reached them even if they had been able to broadcast an SOS. It was 1915, and there were no helicopters, no Weasels, no Sno-Cats, no suitable planes. Thus their plight was naked and terrifying in its simplicity. If they were to get out—they had to get themselves out.

Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated. It gave Shackleton

Returning from a hunting trip, Orde-Lees, traveling on skis across the rotting surface of the ice, had just about reached camp when an evil, knoblike head burst out of the water just in front of him. He turned and fled, pushing as hard as he could with his ski poles and shouting for Wild to bring his rifle. The animal—a sea leopard—sprang out of the water and came after him, bounding across the ice with the peculiar rocking-horse gait of a seal on land. The beast looked like a small dinosaur, with a long, serpentine neck. 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. By then, Orde-Lees had nearly reached the opposite side of the floe; he was about to cross to safe ice when the sea leopard’s head exploded out of the water directly ahead of him. The animal had tracked his shadow across the ice. It made a savage lunge for Orde-Lees with its mouth open, revealing an enormous array of sawlike teeth. Orde-Lees’ shouts for help rose to screams and he turned and raced away from his attacker. The animal leaped out of the water again in pursuit just as Wild arrived with his rifle. The sea leopard spotted Wild, and turned to attack him. Wild dropped to one knee and fired again and again at the onrushing beast. It was less than 30 feet away when it finally dropped. Two dog teams were required to bring the carcass into camp. It measured 12 feet long, and they estimated its weight at about 1,100 pounds. It was a predatory species of seal, and resembled a leopard only in its spotted coat—and its disposition. When it was butchered, balls of hair 2 and 3 inches in diameter were found in its stomach—the remains of crabeater seals it had eaten. The sea leopard’s jawbone, which measured nearly 9 inches across, was given to Orde-Lees as a souvenir of his encounter. In his diary that night, Worsley observed: “A man on foot in soft, deep snow and unarmed would not have a chance against such an animal as they almost bound along with a rearing, undulating motion at least five miles an hour. They attack without provocation, looking on man as a penguin or seal.

They were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world, drifting they knew not where, without a hope of rescue, subsisting only so long as Providence sent them food to eat. And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances. On November 4, Macklin wrote in his diary: "It has been a lovely day, and it is hard to think we are in a frightfully precarious situation." It was an observation typical of the entire party. There was not a hero among them, at least not in the fictional sense. Still not a single diary reflected anything beyond the matter-of-fact routine of each day's business.

He had proved himself on land. He had demonstrated there beyond all doubt his ability to pit his matchless tenacity against the elements—and win. But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

During the day enough light filtered through the canvas roofing so that the men could make their way about, but long before dusk the hut grew much too dark to see anything. Marston and Hurley experimented and found that, by filling a small container with blubber oil and draping pieces of surgical bandage over the edge as a wick, they could obtain a feeble flame by which a man might read if he were not more than a few feet away. By such methods they gradually eliminated one little misery after another.

Orde-Lees wrote one night: “We want to be fed with a large wooden spoon and, like the Korean babies, be patted on the stomach with the back of the spoon so as to get in a little more than would otherwise be the case. In short, we want to be overfed, grossly overfed, yes, very grossly overfed on nothing but porridge and sugar, black currant and apple pudding and cream, cake, milk, eggs, jam, honey and bread and butter till we burst, and we’ll shoot the man who offers us meat. We don’t want to see or hear of any more meat as long as we live.

There was, on the whole, an astounding absence of serious antagonisms, considering the conditions under which they were attempting to exist. Possibly it was because they were in a state of almost perpetual minor friction. Arguments rambled on the whole day through, and they served to let off a great deal of steam which might otherwise have built up. In addition, the party had been reduced to an almost classless society in which most of them felt free to speak their minds, and did. A man who stepped on another man's head trying to find his way out at night was treated to the same abuse as any other, regardless of what his station might once have been.

The ship reacted to each fresh wave of pressure in a different way. Sometimes she simply quivered briefly as a human being might wince if seized by a single, stabbing pain. Other times she retched in a series of convulsive jerks accompanied by anguished outcries. On these occasions her three masts whipped violently back and forth as the rigging tightened like harpstrings. But most agonizing for the men were the times when she seemed a huge creature suffocating and gasping for breath, her sides heaving against the strangling pressure. More than any other single impression in those final hours, all the men were struck, almost to the point of horror, by the way the ship behaved like a giant beast in its death agonies.

There were the sounds of the pack in movement—the basic noises, the grunting and whining of the floes, along with an occasional thud as a heavy block collapsed. But in addition, the pack under compression seemed to have an almost limitless repertoire of sounds, many of which seemed strangely unrelated to the noise of ice undergoing pressure. Sometimes there was a sound like a gigantic train with squeaky axles being shunted roughly about with a great deal of bumping and clattering. 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. 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.

Nor did the Antarctic represent to Shackleton merely the grubby means to a financial end. In a very real sense he needed it—something so enormous, so demanding, that it provided a touchstone for his monstrous ego and implacable drive. In ordinary situations, Shackleton's tremendous capacity for boldness and daring found almost nothing worthy of its pulling power; he was a Percheron draft horse harnessed to a child's wagon cart. But in the Antarctic—here was a burden which challenged every atom of his strength. Thus, while Shackleton was undeniably out of place, even inept, in a great many everyday situations, he had a talent—a genius, even—that he shared with only a handful of men throughout history—genuine leadership. He was, as one of his men put it, "the greatest leader that ever came on God's earth, bar none.

wave-tossed cockleshells, and, finally, we’ve

From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed.

Instead, life was reckoned in periods of a few hours, or possibly only a few minutes—an endless succession of trials leading to deliverance from the particular hell of the moment.

But we are in the hands of a Higher Power, and puny mortals that we are, can do nothing to help ourselves against these colossal forces of nature.

After a time, however, Wild succumbed to mounting pressure and a two gallon gasoline can was made into a urinal for use at night. The rule was that the man who raised its level to within two inches of the top had to carry the can outside and empty it. If a man felt the need and the weather outside was bad, he would lie awake waiting for somebody else to go so that he might judge from the sound the level of the can's contents. If it sounded ominously close to the top, he would try and hold out until morning. But it was not always possible to do so, and he might be forced to get up. More than once, a man would fill the can as silently as possible then steal back into his sleeping bag. The next man to get up would find to his fury that the can was full and had to be emptied before it could be used.

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing.

There was even a trace of mild exhilaration in their attitude. At least, they had a clear-cut task ahead of them. The nine months of indecision, of speculation about what might happen, of aimless drifting with the pack were over. Now they simply had to get themselves out, however appallingly difficult that might be.

She was to carry the Ross Sea party, under the command of Lieutenant Aeneas Mackintosh, who had served aboard the Nimrod on Shackleton’s 1907–1909 expedition.

The ship had been named the Polaris. After the sale, Shackleton rechristened her Endurance, in keeping with the motto of his family, Fortitudine vincimus—“By endurance we conquer.

The date was October 27, 1915. The name of the ship was Endurance. The position was 69°5´ South, 51°30´ West—deep in the icy wasteland of the Antarctic’s treacherous Weddell Sea, just about midway between the South Pole and the nearest known outpost of humanity, some 1,200 miles away. Few men have borne the responsibility Shackleton did at that moment. Though he certainly was aware that their situation was desperate, he could not possibly have imagined then the physical and emotional demands that ultimately would be placed upon them, the rigors they would have to endure, the sufferings to which they would be subjected. They were for all practical purposes alone in the frozen Antarctic seas. It had been very nearly a year since they had last been in contact with civilization. Nobody in the outside world knew they were in trouble, much less where they were. They had no radio transmitter with which to notify any would-be rescuers, and it is doubtful that any rescuers could have reached them even if they had been able to broadcast an SOS. It was 1915, and there were no helicopters, no Weasels, no Sno-Cats, no suitable planes. Thus their plight was naked and terrifying in its simplicity. If they were to get out—they had to get themselves out. Shackleton

The simple act of sailing had carried him beyond the world of reversals, frustrations, and inanities. 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.

I am absolutely obsessed with the idea of escaping . . . We have been over 4 months on the floe—a time of absolute and utter inutility to anyone. There is absolutely nothing to do but kill time as best one may. Even at home, with theatres and all sorts of amusements, changes of scene and people, four months idleness would be tedious: One can then imagine how much worse it is for us. One looks forward to meals, not for what one will get, but as definite breaks in the day. All around us we have day after day the same unbroken whiteness, unrelieved by anything at all.

Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

Early in May the sun appeared over the horizon for the last time, then slowly dropped from sight—and the Antarctic night began. It did not happen all at once; the gradually diminishing dusk grew shorter and less intense each day. For a time a hazy, deceiving half-light remained, and the stark outline of the ship could be seen against the horizon. But it was difficult to perceive distances. Even the ice underfoot grew strangely indistinct so that walking became hazardous. A man could drop into an unseen hollow or collide with a hummock thinking it was still a dozen yards away. But before long even the half-light disappeared—and they were left in darkness. CHAPTER 5 In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night.

Early in May the sun appeared over the horizon for the last time, then slowly dropped from sight—and the Antarctic night began. It did not happen all at once; the gradually diminishing dusk grew shorter and less intense each day. For a time a hazy, deceiving half-light remained, and the stark outline of the ship could be seen against the horizon. But it was difficult to perceive distances. Even the ice underfoot grew strangely indistinct so that walking became hazardous. A man could drop into an unseen hollow or collide with a hummock thinking it was still a dozen yards away. But before long even the half-light disappeared—and they were left in darkness.

Whales, too, seemed everywhere. They surfaced on all sides, sometimes frighteningly close

The James Caird was in the lead with Shackleton at the tiller.

precious little had been learned about conditions in these unfrequented waters.

They also mounted stubby masts to which a sail could be secured;

they were primarily pulling boats, designed for rowing, not sailing.

The animal—a sea leopard—sprang out of the water and came after him,

The beast looked like a small dinosaur, with a long, serpentine neck.

The animal leaped out of the water again in pursuit just as Wild arrived with his rifle.

just to be in his presence was an experience. It was what made Shackleton so great a leader.

The weather continued to deteriorate, which seemed hardly possible.

They thus remained almost motionless, while their supply of meat dwindled alarmingly.

Then on January 13, a rumor spread that Shackleton was considering killing the dogs

to ease the drain on the food supplies.

there was a deep emotional attachment involved.

At the thought of losing Grus, a puppy born a year before on the Endurance, Macklin reflected:

Then, in a quiet, level voice, Shackleton ordered Wild to shoot his own team along with McIlroy’s, Marston’s, and Crean’s.

Each dog in turn was taken off his trace and led behind a row of large ice hummocks.

None of the dogs seemed to sense what was happening,

unsuspectingly around the ice hummock to his death with his tail wagging.

Shackleton decided to spare Greenstreet’s team of year-old puppies “for the present,

However, they managed to collect two loads of about 500 pounds apiece,

consisting of canned vegetables, tapioca, dog pemmican, and jam.

Shackleton made the decision on the spot: they would abandon the effort to reach Clarence or Elephant Island

a party of eighteen under Wild should start out early the next morning to bring up the Stancomb Wills.

On February 9, Shackleton wrote: “No seals. Must reduce blubber consumption . . . oh for a touch of dry land under our feet.

stewed penguin heart, liver, eyes, tongues, toes & God knows what else, with a cup of water” to wash it down.

It now lay exactly 91 miles away. But it was off to the WNW,

Unless there was a radical change in the northerly movement of the pack,

it seemed that they would simply pass Paulet Island by.

Then, on March 9, they felt the swell—the undeniable, unmistakable rise and fall of the ocean.

But Worsley took his chronometer out to the edge of the floe and timed the interval between swells—eighteen seconds,

They had had no sleep for almost eighty hours, and their bodies had been drained by exposure

There is an immense area of persistent low pressure in the vicinity of the Antarctic Circle,

often studiously understated language of the U.S. Navy’s

Sailing Direction for Antarctica, these winds are described categorically:

They are often of hurricane intensity and with gust velocities sometimes attaining to 150 to 200 miles per hour.

as nowhere else on earth, the sea girdles the globe,

The waves thus produced have become legendary among seafaring men. They are called Cape Horn Rollers

Charles Darwin, on first seeing these waves breaking on Tierra del Fuego in 1833, wrote in his diary:

The sight . . . is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril and shipwreck.

Thus, while Shackleton was undeniably out of place, even inept, in a great many everyday situations,

He was, as one of his men put it, “the greatest leader that ever came on God’s earth, bar none.

The largest items needed for the expedition were the ships that would carry the two parties to the Antarctic.

Men sat and cursed, not loudly but with an intenseness that showed their hatred

At noon they were almost abeam of Cape Demidov once more,

dead ahead were two inviting glaciers which held the promise of ice to be melted into water.