10 Replies to “Endurance”

  1. Perhaps the greatest Arctic or Antarctic explorer of all time. The escape of Shackleton and the rescue of his entire crew is a story of leadership and endurance (how appropriate). His ship may have been wrecked by the Antarctic ice, but he got his entire crew out. No one died as a result of his determination and perseverance, and in the middle of WW1, that was a miracle.

  2. I read the book about their story and something near the end of the book amazed me.. after all the incredible things they did to endure Shackleton and a couple of his crew made it to an island where there was a whaling outpost.. but they had went off course and landed on the other side of the island. So you know, they just hiked across the island by climbing over mountains and sliding down glaciers. This is an excerpt:

    ‘The storms had pushed the James Caird off course, and they had landed on the other side of the island from the whaling station. And so Shackleton, Worsley and Tom Crean set off to reach it by foot—climbing over mountains and sliding down glaciers, forging a path that no human being had ever forged before, until, after 36 hours of desperate hiking, they staggered into the station at Stromness.’

    They really were made of sterner stuff back then.

    1. Oh yes. And an enormous degree of skill and knowledge. They arrived at South Georgia after crossing more than 1,000 km in open boats, navigating by sextant and a clock to provide latitude and longitude. Along the way, they had to endure an Antarctic hurricane. It’s perhaps the most spectacular, long-distance ocean voyaging by open boats in history.

      Shackleton was truly one of the world’s greatest explorers.

  3. Whenever I forget my gortex pants or get a soaker, I picture myself explaining it to the dudes stuck on a tiny gravel and rock sliver of shoreline of the south pole eating raw penguins for half a year.

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