… at 11am our floe suddenly split right across under the boats. We rushed our gear on to the larger of the two pieces and watched with strained attention for the next development. The crack had cut through the site of my tent. I stood on the edge of the new fracture, and, looking across the widening channel of water, could see the spot where for many months my head and shoulders had rested when I was in my sleeping bag [...] The ice had sunk under my weight during the months of waiting in the tent, and I had many times put snow under the bag to fill the hollow. The lines of stratification showed clearly the different layers of snow. How fragile and precarious had been our resting place! [...] Now our home was being shattered under our feet, and we had a sense of loss and incompleteness hard to describe.
So begins the most harrowing part of the phenomenal story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to Antarctica in 1914-1917. It is described in Shackleton’s own account entitled South: The Endurance Expedition. He wrote the book in 1919 after he returned to England and World War One ended.
At this point in the story, Shackleton and his men have been camping on ice floes for almost six months. Ever since they abandoned the Endurance, and watched her crushed by ice. Now with the pack ice breaking up all around them, they’re about to set off in the three open lifeboats, rowing across freezing seas in the hope of land, sometimes camping on floes watching all night for cracks and for “killers blowing in the lanes around,” sometimes merely tying up their boats to pieces of ice and landing the cooker.
It was this last aspect that really disturbed me. I’ve pondered and pondered this, but just how do you pull up at an ice floe? But like everything about this story, the seemingly impossible proves possible, including parking at ice floes. And after several more nights floating on the “open, freezing sea” awake all night, and the near loss of one of the boats when a floe cracks underneath them, they finally reach Elephant Island on 14 April 1916. It’s the first land they’ve had under their feet for 497 days.
There are many more travails, so many and so testing that my mind still reels even though I know the story. But through it all Shackleton triumphs. Until the mighty day, the “day of wonders” – 30 August 1916 – when, on his fourth attempt to rescue the men on Elephant Island, they see a ship in the distance and recognise Sir Ernest’s figure climbing down into a lifeboat. As one of the men wrote in his diary:
Soon the boat approached near enough for the Boss, who was standing up in the bows, to shout to Wild, “Are you all well?” To which he replied, “All safe, all well,” and we could see a smile light up the Boss’s face as he said, “Thank God!”
*****
About the book
South is wonderful literature in its own right. The writing is superb: fluid, graphic, mesmerising and with the sparsest, most tantalising, inflection. And there’s a particular frisson to be had from reading the great man’s actual words, most of which are direct excerpts from the diary he kept on the trip.
The quality of Shackleton’s writing and the effect of his authorial voice shows up even more vividly when the book switches to the story of the Ross Sea party led by Mackintosh and the story of the drift of the Aurora under Stenhouse. For these accounts, Shackleton has to rely on the diaries of others. And without Shackleton as the central character and narrator, the stories of these men, though valiant and heart-breaking, just cannot compare with what has gone before. To read the three stories one after the other – the story of the Endurance, the story of the depot-laying, and the story of the Aurora – is to be awed all over again at Shackleton’s accomplishment and the spirit in which he did it.
About the man
Ernest Henry Shackleton (1874-1922) was just a man. Apparently. Yet he had skills and personal qualities that seem unearthly.
He was a man who inspired men to place their trust, their faith and their lives in him, and he rewarded that faith over and over again. He made decisions quickly, and never regretted a decision, even when it was wrong. And he was quite often wrong, which is interesting and salutary.
He expected complete subordination, and always — even with his peerless second-in-command, Frank Wild — there was a slight distance between himself and the other men. At the same time, he did the work of three, and sacrificed whatever he had to bring succour to another.
When he’s about to climb over the mountains of South Georgia he remarks casually that he’s given his boots to someone else with frostbite, and the carpenter has to use the nails from the James Caird to create a grip on the bottom of his shoes. And, according to Wikipedia, on an earlier expedition he had given his one ration of food for the day – a single biscuit – to Frank Wild when he was ill, prompting Wild to write in his diary:
All the money that was ever minted would not have bought that biscuit and the remembrance of that sacrifice will never leave me.
But there are two qualities Shackleton exemplifies above all: (1) a kind of psychical plasticity, and (2) equanimity. The former is summed up in a passage soon after they have abandoned the Endurance:
The task now was to secure the safety of the party, and to that I must bend my energies and mental power and apply every bit of knowledge that experience of the Antarctic had given me. The task was likely to be long and strenuous, and an ordered mind and a clear program were essential if we were to come through without loss of life. A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground.
A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground. That’s it. That’s what Shackleton does over and over again. Forever re-shaping himself to a new limit, new circumstances. Rising to them, meeting them, and doing so “directly.” No hesitation, no rumination, just rising to the next danger and the next danger and the next.
And equanimity? Well, this is the thing he has in abundance. And though he says it of Wild when he steps on to Elephant Island, the following applies even more to Shackleton:
I remember that Wild, who always rose superior to fortune, bad and good, came ashore as I was looking at the men and stood beside me as easy and unconcerned as if he had stepped out of his car for a stroll in the Park.
*****
There’s one last thing that strikes me about Shackleton when reading South. And that’s the contrast between his position in relation to time, and our contemporary one.
When “shaping himself to a new mark,” Shackleton is constantly projecting himself into the future. He positively colonises the future. He is calculating, imagining, visualising, planning for the future at every second. The future for him is always and unquestionably a superior realm than the one he’s in at any moment. Always there’s the expectation of something better just ahead.
This seems very different to our contemporary, everyday relation to time in which many of us operate in the belief the next moment will not be better than the present one. Possibly this is merely the difference between being in extremis and being in comfort. Possibly it marks a real change in our experience of time, and our experience of the past, present and future, since Shackleton made his epic journey in 1914. Possibly, to put it another way, it marks a real change in our relation to hope.
Read this book. You’ll be transported, elated and moved. There are few stories to compare.
*****
To read South, get the free Gutenberg text by clicking here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5199
To listen to South, get the free audio version by clicking on the following link. Note, the link also contains a recording of Shackleton talking about the expedition:
http://www.archive.org/details/south_shackleton_0710_librivox
If you want to know more about Shackleton and his life, read the forthcoming book by my blogging friend, Andreas Kluth, of The Hannibal Blog and The Economist. His book features Shackleton and many other figures of “unearthly” skills and personal qualities.
As you know, I got my story from teh books “Endurance” and “Shackleton”, not “South”, but they’re all based on the diaries.
I still dream about sleeping on an ice floe as it cracks underneath me.
Some of the details that colonise my mind:
Sleeping and being wet for the summer months as the floe turns into a shallow lake.
Permanent darkness for the winter months, and the strategies to keep from going insane.
near-complete constipation from eating only blubber, and chafing from using ice as “toilet paper”.
Tears freezing on the cheeks, then breaking off and ripping skin off.
Shooting the dogs.
so much more. As you said. Great, timeless story.
Thanks for the plug at the end.
You’re welcome re the plug. Looking forward to reading your book.
Of the Shackleton books you read, which would you recommend (for after I’ve had a wee break from ice and frostbite)? Is “Endurance” the one by Lansing? Any views on a book by Stephanie Barczewski that features both Shackleton and Scott?
Oh yeh, I dream about the story too. The sleeping on the ice floes, and the physics of getting the lifeboats up onto the floe and off again, haunt me. “South” doesn’t talk much about “the strategies to keep from going insane” except to mention, very fleetingly, the various celebratory dinners (ie, extra portion of fried blubber) and the dog races and the laughs they sometimes had at each other, and of course, Wild’s brilliant command to the men on Elephant Island to pack their bags every day in case the “Boss” came to rescue them that day. Do the other books go into more detail about these strategies?
I will always treasure this story, and revere the memory of Shackleton and his men. It’s been great to be able to discuss it with you.
I haven’t read Barczewski’s book, so I can’t comment.
As for the other two: Yes, Endurance is by Lansing. It was recommended to me and was my entry point into the story. “Shackleton” is a biography which I bought because at that point I was looking for particular information that you may not be interested in, as part of research for my book.
Lansing’s book is a quick and gripping read. But you now already know the story so there’s probably no need to read another, different, version.
Oh OK, it’d be the biography I’d be interested in. Though I guess I’ll just wait to read about it in your book. Any news on the publication date?
Yours is an excellent review of Shackleton’s book.
When I grew up in the 1950s, it was not the name of Shackleton, but of his rival, Captain Robert Scott, which was most synonymous with Antarctic exploration. It was therefore Scott, not Shackleton, who I read about when a boy.
So I was interested to learn, after perusing Wikipedia, that, beginning in the 1960s, Scott’s reputation began to go down, and Shackleton’s to come up. Thus now, it is Shackleton’s name which is on the lips of all, and not Scott’s.
However, Scott’s reputation would appear once again to be on the rise. Is it destined again to eclipse Shackleton’s?
This makes us realise that fame is a product of public relations, and of historical circumstances. The person who does the things which makes him a hero, was in the right place at the right time, or otherwise lived at a particular historical period when his qualities were called for.
Had Shackleton lived today, he might – given his predilection to drink, fecklessness with money, and that there are no more places on earth to explore – have become an anonymous skid-row bum.
Hello Mr Pip. Thanks for the compliment. I really appreciate it.
I get what you say about Scott. I was born in the 60s and when I was growing up I’d only heard of Scott too. I remember watching a movie about him when I was a kid and crying my eyes out when he says the famous line about “just going out for a walk.” It is interesting how each of them has risen and fallen in public opinion. Mmm … I’m not sure what I think about the question of whether the man makes the context, or the context makes the man. Sounds like you think the latter. I want to ponder that …
I just figured out why I sometimes get confused in your comment sections: The comments are in reverse chronological order, except when replying to specific comments. So there are chronological threads within a reverse chronological ueber-thread.
Fixed. Thanks.