Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic

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Tragically, the Endurance crashes into some ice and takes on water. This occurs somewhere in the Weddell Sea. Somehow most of the crew manages to launch escape boats before the ship sinks, but some men are forced to leap overboard and are lost to the ice. Those who make it into the boats drift among the ice floes for over a year, gradually trying to make their way to land. That happened in December 1911, when a highly prepared Norwegian expedition led by Roald Amundsen decisively beat the (ironically) better-remembered one led by a British Royal Navy Officer named Robert Falcon Scott. After six miserable days, the three lifeboats land on Elephant Island on April 15, the first time that the 28 men touch solid ground after precisely 497 days!

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.” The author then went to North Park College between 1946 and 1948 and then to Northwestern University to study journalism between 1948 and 1950. At the university, he was the editor of the weekly paper until he graduated to go work for United Press. Born in Chicago on July 21, 1921, Lansing served the U.S. Navy during the Second World War and received a Purple Heart for being wounded during his service. Afterward, he enrolled at North Park College and later at Northwestern University, where he majored in journalism. It was almost as if he had nothing to accomplish anymore. But, restless and resolute as he was, just a few years later, he turned to the “one great object of Antarctic journeyings” remaining: transatlantic journey, i.e., crossing Antarctica from the Wendell Sea via the South Pole to McMurdo Sound. He edited a weekly newspaper between 1946 and 1949, before joining the United Press and becoming a freelance writer in 1952.

The Endurance is trapped in the Antarctic ice. The ship’s condition worsens by the minute. Engineers are desperately trying to keep up with the rising water levels and failing pumps, but they know that it won’t be long before there’s no hope left for them or their comrades on board.

First discovered by a Russian expedition in 1820, the continent of Antarctica became an object of fascination for numerous explorers around the world during the last years of the 19 th century and the first two decades of the 20 th century. To history buffs and readers of exploration literature, this period is mostly known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

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.” With Walter Modell, Lansing co-authored one of the last books from the Life Science Library, Drugs (1967). Just eight years later, he died, aged 54. Plot Lansing was a native of Chicago, Illinois, the son of Edward (1896–1949), a Chicagoan who worked as an electrician, and his wife Ruth Henderson (1896–1975), a native of New Jersey. After serving in the U.S. Navy from 1940 to 1946, where he received a Purple Heart, he enrolled at North Park College and later at Northwestern University, where he majored in journalism. [2] He edited a weekly newspaper in Illinois until 1949, when he joined the United Press and in 1952 became a freelance writer. [3] He spent time in New York, writing for the books section of Reader's Digest and Time Inc., eventually returning to Chicago to become the editor of the Bethel Home News. [4] Lansing settled in Bethel, CT where he was the editor of the Bethel Home News. He died there in the mid-1970's. Then look no further: Alfred Lansing’s classic Endurance is its best and most spellbinding account.

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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”

To pen his book, Lansing interviewed several surviving members of the expedition. He also gained access to the personal diaries and journals of eight survivors while researching the book. To make matters worse, soon the Antarctic summer (which coincides with our winter) ended and the endless polar nights began. “In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night,” writes Lansing. “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 all together, and it has driven some men mad.” And it’s not about merely reaching the South Pole, but about something even more daunting and unimaginable: crossing the entire continent from sea to sea, via the pole. And then he adds something even more central about his character, something almost superhuman in an Ahab-or- Santiago-kind-of-way: “Whatever his mood—whether it was gay and breezy, or dark with rage—he had one pervading characteristic: he was purposeful.” The Objective and the Plan of the ExpeditionForgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth The men were calm as they prepared to leave the ship. They attached a canvas chute to the rail and slid each dog down it onto the ice below. The sky was clear, but there was movement in the ice that worked like a jigsaw puzzle to cut up and separate the ship into two pieces. The men noticed how much like an animal dying in agony their ship behaved at this time. What makes this such a great work is that it comes with more than 170 previously unpublished photos by Frank J Hurley, who was the lead photographer for the expedition. The photographer artfully made beautiful tributes to the fortitude of the men and the ice.