"Escape from the Antarctic" by Sir Ernest Shackleton

This tiny book tells a fraction of the story of The Endurance commanded by Shackleton which was attempting to land men for a trans-Antarctic expedition when it was caught in pack ice; after some months drifting the ship was crushed and the men had to camp on the drifting ice floe; they then got into two small boats and headed for Elephant Island where they camped. This book completes their adventures from this point.

Shackleton and five others sailed a small boat through mountainous seas 800 miles to South Georgia. Just sighting the sun through a sextant in a pitching boat in the middle of a hurricane when there was precious little sun made the navigation difficult, almost impossible. They endured days of hurricane and gale. When they reached South Georgia they had to stand away from the shore because the seas were driving the boat inland and threatened to smash it on the rocks. Finally they made landfall and captured baby albatross chicks to stew.

Then Shackleton and two others trekked across the South Georgia mountains which had never been crossed, or even explored, before. Finally they reached the whaling station and obtained relief for their crew mates. Even then it was weeks before they could charter a ship which could penetrate the newly forming pack ice and rescue the 22 men abandoned on Elephant Island.

Sometimes Shackleton gets bogged down in the details and this story is marred by only being a fraction of the full adventure but it was a delightful little read.

Selected quotes:

• "At midnight I was at the tiller and suddenly noticed a line of clear sky between the south and southwest .... a moment later I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds but the white crest of an enormous wave. During twenty-six years' experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic. It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days."

• "I know that during the 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.'" It is this paragraph that led T. S. Eliot to write in The Waste Land:

"Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you"

May 2009, 90 pages

Other books about travel and exploration reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God