Endurance Shackleton 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.

We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.

Through endurance we conquer.

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.

Loneliness is the penalty of leadership, but the man who has to make the decisions is assisted greatly if he feels that there is no uncertainty in the minds of those who follow him, and that his orders will be carried out confidently and in expectation of success.

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.

We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.

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

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

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.

When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, ‘Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.’ Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.

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.

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.

Our spoons are one of our indispensable possessions here. To lose one's spoon would be almost as serious as it is for an edentate person to lose his set of false teeth.

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.

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

be made of the wind’s actual speed,

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

There once was a mouse who lived in a tavern. One night the mouse found a leaky barrel of beer, and he drank all he could hold. When the mouse had finished, he sat up, twirled his whiskers, and looked around arrogantly. “Now then,” he said, “where’s that damned cat?

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.

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.

[...] "Who the hell are you?" he said at last. The man in the center stepped forward. "My name is Shackleton" he replied in a quiet voice.

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

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 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.

Shackleton, who had witnessed on the Scott expedition the corrosive tensions among team members, sought recruits with the qualities he deemed essential for polar exploration. First, optimism; second, patience; third, physical endurance; fourth, idealism; fifth and last, courage.

Shackleton, who had witnessed on the Scott expedition the corrosive tensions among team members, sought recruits with the qualities that he deemed essential for polar exploration: “First, optimism; second, patience; third, physical endurance; fourth, idealism; fifth and last, courage.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 Endurance is crushed between the floes, October 24, 1915 (Royal Geographic Society) Frank Wild surveys the wreck of the Endurance on November 8, 1915, during their last official visit to the wreck (Royal Geographic Society)

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.

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.

than

The Weddell Sea was roughly circular in shape, hemmed in by three land masses: the Antarctic continent itself, the Palmer Peninsula, and the islands of the South Sandwich group. Consequently much of the ice that formed in the Weddell Sea was held there, prevented by the encircling land from escaping into the open ocean where it might have melted. The winds in the area were light, by Antarctic standards, and not only failed to drive the ice away, but even allowed new ice to form at all seasons of the year, even summer. Finally, a strong prevailing current moving in a clockwise direction tended to drive the ice in an immense semicircle, packing it tightly against the arm of the Palmer Peninsula on the western side of the sea

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.

frozen, like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar.

In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night.

Although once after the Endurance had sunk, McNeish had refused to haul the boats over the ice any farther, and Shackleton had taken him aside and given him a choice; go on hauling or Shackleton would shoot him dead. McNeish had gone on.

Just at daybreak I went over to the 'Endurance' with Wild and Hurley, in order to retrieve some tins of petrol that could be used to boil up milk for the rest of the men. The ship presented a painful spectacle of chaos and wreck. The jib-boom and bowsprit had snapped off during the night and now lay at right angles to the ship, with the chains, martingale, and bob-stay dragging them as the vessel quivered and moved in the grinding pack. The ice had driven over the forecastle and she was well down by the head.

opportunity of winning food and shelter, man can live and even find his laughter ringing true.

People living under civilized conditions, surrounded by Nature's varied forms of life and by all the familiar work of their own hands, may scarcely realize how quickly the mind, influenced by the eyes, responds to the unusual and weaves about it curious imaginings like the firelight fancies of our childhood days.

But if you're a leader, a fellow that other fellows look to, you've got to keep going. That was the thought which sailed us through the hurricane and tugged us up and down those mountains... and when we got to the whaling station, it was the thought of those comrades which made us so mad with joy that the reaction beats all effort to describe it. We didn't so much feel that we were safe as that they were saved.

The Endurance was beset. As Orde-Lees, the storekeeper, put it, “frozen, like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar.

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.

I was hooked. He started me with shorter reads, books such as Endurance,7 which chronicled Ernest Shackleton’s adventures in Antarctica. Later he led me into much larger challenges, such as Undaunted Courage,8 which depicts the journey of Lewis and Clark, and many more interesting and exciting literary adventures. I often exchanged these books with my dad and Coach Pickett back home for their best choices as well, which included Truman,9 and Freedom from Fear.10 I

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.

One of the biggest challenges for a writer of nonfiction is to avoid using too much of his or her hard-won material. A great and enduring book isn’t comprehensive; it is highly, even ruthlessly, selective, zeroing in on the most evocative and illustrative moments while dispensing with the clutter that might prevent the high points from resonating to maximum effect.

Fortitudine Vincimus (By endurance we conquer)

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.

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.

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.

Another night, this time without a drop of water, and possibly another gale—they simply did not have it in them.

By the time they reached the boat her rudder had already been torn off.

Afterwards they turned in and slept for twelve glorious hours without a single interruption.

also be 6 miles closer to Stromness Bay on the opposite side of the island where the whaling stations were situated.

The only superfluous item Shackleton permitted was Worsley’s diary.

He then compared it with the chart and it appeared to correspond to the area of Cape Demidov.

By two-thirty, the Caird was a little more than 3 miles off the coast

The whole complexion of things was suddenly changed. There could be no thought of a landing, not here at least,

Yet now that the journey was done, sanctuary was ironically denied them.

Crean hurriedly took over the helm from Worsley who spread the chart out so that he and Shackleton might study

and wait for daylight.

Before long the rain turned into sleet, then hail that drummed across the decking.

The Caird’s bow was brought up into the wind, and the long wait for daybreak was begun.

Only an estimate could be made of the wind’s actual speed, though it was at least 65 knots.

The rollers that raced shoreward were perhaps 40 feet high, maybe more.

It seemed inconceivable, but during the morning hours the wind actually rose,

close to 80 knots out of the southwest

Their tongues were swollen with thirst,

Then, at just about two o’clock, they saw where they were.

in that single glimpse they saw to their terror that they were only a short distance outside the line of breakers,

No choice remained but to hoist sail and try to claw their way offshore into the teeth of this fiendish gale.

Shackelton rushed aft and took over the lines of the tiller from Crean.

Shackleton shouted excitedly to McNeish and Vincent below to shift ballast

They became aware of it suddenly just after four o’clock

craggy peak off the port bow. It was Annenkov Island,

And they realized at once that it lay directly in their path.

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