The ice took the ship, but not the motto. In this episode, Ernest Shackleton sails for Antarctica with the strongest wooden ship ever built in Norway. Today we go after the real endurance: not the vessel, the men and the man.
Today we are talking about Ernest Shackleton and his quest to become the first man to cross the Antarctic. It all goes horribly wrong and he never even makes it to Antarctica. But what happens is perhaps the most epic survival tale of all time, revealing the real heart of Endurance.
Not the ship. The ship is gone. She was crushed in the ice and swallowed up by the Weddell Sea.
The ship Endurance never made it. But the word did. Because the word came first.
Fortitudine Vincimus. By endurance we conquer. That was Shackleton's family motto, carried by the family long before there was ever a ship to put it on the side of. When he bought a vessel for his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he renamed her for it. And then the ice took the ship, but not the motto. The motto was already rooted in the hearts of the men.
In Part 1:
We start with a boy born in County Kildare who was poor at best in school, finishing near the bottom of his class, but who was a greedy reader, and who was simply not interested in any sort of normal work. We follow him onto Scott's Discovery expedition, where he gets within 500 miles of the South Pole and is hauled back to the ship on a sledge, coughing blood. That humiliation becomes the fuel for everything after.
Then the plan. Two ships, two teams, opposite sides of the continent. Eighteen hundred miles across ground no human being had ever seen, carrying only half the food they needed, betting their lives that men they would never meet had left the rest of it waiting for them.
We look at the ship herself, and she really is a beast. A keel of four solid oak pieces stacked seven feet one inch thick. A bow where every timber was cut from a single oak tree, chosen so its natural growth followed the curve of the design, four feet four inches of solid wood. The strongest wooden ship ever built in Norway. Armored end to end against the wrong threat.
We meet the crew, more than 5,000 people applied, including three women and Shackleton's interview process, which was quite odd but effective. Five minutes. Sometimes less. He wasn't hiring from the resume. He was trying to get under it.
Then they sail into the Weddell Sea in the worst ice year anyone could remember, after every man on South Georgia told him to wait until next season.
And on January 24th, 1915, with open water close enough to hit with a stone, all sails up and the engine at full steam, she leaned against the ice with all her might and never moved a foot.
Never moved a foot.
Source material: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing, 1959. It's a fantastic book. I highly suggest you pick up a copy if you can.
Part 2 coming soon — the ice takes the ship, and we follow Shackleton as he battles to save every man.
If the show is helping you, leave a review wherever you listen. It grows the show, and the best part is it doesn't cost you a dime.
Until next time — make it a beautiful day in your neighborhood.
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Please Check out Explorers Podcast if you would like to learn more about Ernest Shackleton
Ernest Shackleton – Explorers Podcast
Books
Here was a patched and battered 22-foot boat.
Daring to sail alone across the world's most tempestuous sea, her rigging festooned with a threadbare collection of clothing and half-rotten sleeping bags,
Her crew consisted of six men whose faces were black with caked soot and half hidden by matted beards, whose bodies were dead white from constant soaking in salt water. In addition, their faces and particularly their fingers were marked with ugly round patches of missing skin where frostbite had eaten into their flesh.
Their legs from their knees down were chafed and raw from the countless punishing trips crawling across the rocks in the bottom of the boat.
All of them were afflicted with saltwater boils on their wrists, ankles, and buttocks. But had someone unexpectedly come across this bizarre scene, undoubtedly the most striking thing would have been the [00:01:00] attitude of the men, relaxed, even faintly jovial, as if they were on some kind of outing of some sort
When I read that, here is what I see.
Endurance
Not the ship.
The ship is gone.
She was crushed in the ice and swallowed up by the Weddell Sea months before this moment
This tiny lifeboat is the James Caird, and it was named after the man that funded the expedition.
Six men, they're trying to cross 800 miles of the most violent ocean on Earth.
The ship Endurance never made it, but the Word did because the Word came first
Fortitudine Vincimus
Or to put it in English terms
By endurance we conquer.
That was Ernest Shackleton's family motto carried by the family long before there was ever a ship to put it on the side of.
When Ernest Shackleton bought the vessel for his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he renamed her for it.
And then the ice took the ship, but not the motto.
The motto was already rooted in the hearts of the men.
If we zoom in on one of those six men that's in the lifeboat, who's caked with soot from months of cooking over a blubber oil stove, with the same boils on his wrist and ankles as everybody else, the same raw legs from crawling across the ballast stones that are in the bottom of the boat, same rotten sleeping bag.
That's the leader, the men that the crew simply call the boss.
Never above his men, he's in it with them.
Most of you probably know some version of this story, the ship Endurance, that's trapped in the ice of the Weddell Sea, the great survival tale.
Today, we're going after the real Endurance, not the vessel, the men and the man.
The book, Endurance, it was written by Alfred Lansing in nineteen fifty-nine, and I just finished reading it.
It's a fantastic book. I highly suggest that you pick up a copy if you can, and it's gonna be our source material for today.
Lansing gives this ship a heart and soul, and I felt it while I was reading this book, and it's fair, and it's beautifully done.
But the ship, it was a material thing.
It's wood, it's iron, it's rigging.
She put up a good battle against the ice, but she was no match, and the ice took her to the bottom of the sea.
The heart and soul was never in the hull.
It's firmly rooted in Shackleton and his men.
That's the story that kept me turning the pages, and I wanted to share it with you today.
Because I came out of this book with a notebook full of things that directly apply to how you and I work.
And sure, nobody's asking us to sail eight hundred miles in an open boat.
That is just crazy.
But the thing that Shackleton has, we need a version of it.
The ability to do hard things, badly rewarded again and again for far longer than you thought you would have to.
That's endurance, and that is the job.
Before we jump into the story, just a few housekeeping items.
If you're new here, welcome to the show, and if you're returning, well, welcome back.
My name is Larry, and this is a podcast called Deeply Driven.
I've always been fascinated with those who have a passion in their heart, and they follow it regardless of the risks that are associated.
Combine this with my love of business, history, and reading, and it only seems fitting to share what I learn with you.
In the book today, we find an author, Alfred Lansing, who becomes obsessed, completely obsessed with Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance story
And this was his first book that he ever wrote, and nothing else after it even comes close.
Lansing spends a lot of time with the few surviving members of the Endurance, and most notably Alexander Macklin.
Macklin was the ship's surgeon and also a longtime personal friend to Ernest Shackleton.
Lansing's wife describes him as writing obsessively.
His focus was to capture the story of the men from the men's point of view, to make you feel like you were there with the crew on the ship as it's sailing, as it's stuck, as it's sinking, and as they struggle to survive.
You really feel like you're in the book, the ups and the downs. I tell you what, there were a few times I felt sick to my stomach reading what these men were going through and their struggles, and then other times I just wanted to jump up and cheer for them. It's really a rollercoaster, and I highly, highly recommend it
In addition, he spends a lot of time going through their soot-covered diaries and their water-stained logbooks to pull out all of the details.
And you know what?
There's no superheroes in this story that are defying danger,
These are mortal men facing extreme circumstances who did what needed to be done.
And just one other quick note here. Along with Shackleton, there were 27 other men that were on the expedition. As they're introduced, what I'll do is I'll state their names and their position for reference, and then after that, I'll simply use their last names. Because that's how they appear in the book. And I'll try to keep the extra characters to maybe six or eight in total.
Before we get into the Endurance expedition, I'd like to give you some background on Shackleton.
And to be fair here, the book is a little thin in this area, so I'll keep it brief.
Shackleton, he's born County Kildare, Ireland, February 15th, 1874, to a middle-class family.
On episode 21, we covered Arthur Guinness, who was also born County Kildare 150 years before, though.
Soon, Arthur's great-grandson, Edward, is gonna come into contact with Shackleton
Now at the age of four, the family moves from the countryside to Dublin, and then a few years later, this Irish boy finds himself in an English school outside of London.
In academics, Shackleton is poor at best, finishing towards the bottom of his class.
But his professors note that he was really bright, just not applying himself.
Shackleton, later on in life, he does admit that he was very bored in school.
Instead, he was a greedy reader, and I love that description, greedy reader. This fills his time.
At the age of 16, he joins the British Merchant Navy, and he moves quickly up the ranks.
Lansing notes, "This sort of step-by-step advancement grew progressively less appealing to his flamboyant personality. He is simply not interested in any sort of normal work."
At the age of 26 in 1901, he's introduced to the Antarctic and the Robert Falcon Scott Discovery Expedition.
With no experience on the ice, he secures a spot.
Shackleton, he's a smooth talker, and he uses this to his advantage to build fast relationships. Especially with the expedition's financier, Llewellyn Logstaff, who makes a firm recommendation for young Ernest.
Once in the Antarctic camp, Shackleton is further selected from the field of men to advance to the South Pole.
After three months, they come to within five hundred miles or so of the pole. A new further south record of the time.
As they return to the ship, Shackleton, he's in rough condition here. He's coughing blood, and he's so ill that he can't even walk.
He has to be pulled as part of the sledges, and this is more than embarrassing. It's downright humiliation, and it becomes the fuel for everything afterwards. It also wins him an early ticket home on a relief ship.
The expedition's leader, Scott, he sees him as an invalid, and he's not having any of that on his crew.
Now, while this might sound like a career-ender, it was not.
Back home, Shackleton in his outgoing personality with his good looks and his smooth talking, he quickly becomes well-known for his time on the ice and his outlandish tales of the expedition.
The humiliation part had been excluded.
That's gonna catch up to him later, but none of that really seems to matter to Shackleton.
His imagination of riches and fame is already set.
Lansing writes about this.
“The Antarctic and the financial security became more or less synonymous in Shackleton's thinking. He felt the success here, some marvelous stroke of daring, a deed which would capture the world's imagination, would open the door to fame and then riches.”
Yet he still needs to support his family, and he needs to try to raise funding for future expeditions.
Thus, he bounces from one business idea to the next
“He was entranced with new schemes, each of which in turn he was sure would win a fortune. It would be impossible to list them all, but they included an idea to manufacture cigarettes
A surefire plan with an endorsement. A fleet of taxi cabs, mining in Bulgaria, a whaling factory, even digging for buried treasure. most of his ideas never got beyond the talking stage, and those that did were usually unsuccessful.”
I think that just drives home the point that Shackleton, he wasn't interested in a nine-to-five like the rest of society.
He has a deeper drive inside, one for the ice and the snow.
So in 1907, he sets off on his own with a ship called Nimrod. This is where Shackleton and Guinness meet back up in the story.
Edward Guinness would pledge $2,000 towards the expedition.
Out of all the expeditions that Shackleton undertakes for the duration of his entire life, this one was by far his most successful geographical achievement.
They come to within 97 miles of the South Pole, and he makes a hard choice to turn around.
Later, he tells his wife, better a live donkey than a dead lion.
At the heart of the story here, Shackleton, he's redefining victory as everyone coming home safe, and this builds a lot of credibility in the eyes of his men.
A lot of the men on this Nimrod expedition, they're gonna return for the next voyage to the Antarctic.
But at the time, it's another new south record, for now at least.
Plus, they find and chart a way to the pole via what becomes called the Beardmore Glacier, and that glacier was named after Nimrod's main financial backer, Beardmore, that is.
This work, it helps future explorers who eventually beat Shackleton to the pole.
Back in England in 1909, he is a national hero, and he's knighted.
And he would now be known as Sir Ernest Shackleton.
And a quick side note here, if you would like to learn more about the early years of Ernest Shackleton and the expeditions prior to Endurance, I would highly recommend listening to the Explorers Podcast.
Their 11-part series covers the entire life of Shackleton.
I just finished it. And aside from Lansing's book, it gives a thorough and comprehensive coverage of his life and his expeditions.
Episodes one through five if you wanna know about the early stuff.
Big thanks to the Explorers Podcast for their hard work. I can appreciate how much time that took to produce that series.
And what I'll do here is I'll link to it in the show notes if you'd like to check that out further.
Okay. Like I had mentioned before, the early years of Shackleton are really thin.
But we do find ourselves at the start of the Endurance expedition here really early on in the book.
And Shackleton, Sir Ernest Shackleton, I should say, he's now a knight. And most importantly, his purpose in life was laid out before him.
He knows exactly what it is he is meant to do, and Lansing says it so well
Nor did the Antarctic represent to Shackleton merely a 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 monuments 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.
And that last line just makes me laugh there because I imagine this beautiful, powerful horse attached to that little cart just pulling it around like crazy.
He formulates a new plan because the South Pole, it had been captured by his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen, in 1911.
A month later after that, Scott, the explorer, he arrives to find the Norwegian flag flying at the pole.
Sadly, Scott, he would die on his return trip from the pole, and that's a podcast for another time.
If we focus on Shackleton, his new goal is to become the first person to cross the Antarctic continent
The plan on paper is simple.
Send one ship with a team of men. I'll call that the support team they're gonna go through the Ross Sea to McMurdo Sound, and then once they're on land, their objective is to follow the already established, thanks past Shackleton, 800-mile route to the pole, and they did exactly as asked.
They placed every depot of food and supplies in the bitter cold, depots that would never be reached, and cost three men their lives.
On the other side of the continent, Shackleton and his team would enter the Weddell Sea and land near what is known as Veshel Bay.
From here, it's a thousand miles to the pole, and they're only gonna carry half of the food and supplies that are needed for the 1,800-mile journey.
When I think about that, that's just wild.
And then from the pole to McMurdo, they're dependent upon the food and supplies from the Ross Sea team.
And it's simple to summarize here, it really is a beast of a plan. It's one of the most hostile terrains on the Earth, and they're going on blind trust that the Ross Sea team is successful.
There's no radios or no means of communication.
For the Ross Sea party, Shackleton, he secures the ship Aurora, It's gonna be commanded under Lieutenant Aeneas Mackintosh.
And Mackintosh, he was a faithful Shackleton follower. He had served on that Nimrod expedition.
In fact, many of the men rejoined Shackleton from his past, and more on this here real shortly.
On the other side of the continent, Shackleton, he's gonna command the newly built ship Endurance and she is a beast of a ship, checking in at 144 foot long and 25 foot wide.
And the keel or the backbone of the ship that runs end to end, this is the first part of the ship that they build everything from.
And I had to look that up myself. I didn't know what a keel was, but I get it. I understand it. And just check this out.
It's four solid oak pieces that are stacked seven feet one inches thick.
Her sides are made of oak and Norwegian mountain fir with a thickness of 18 inches all the way up to two and a half feet. To protect her from ice scraping is an outer skin of what is called greenheart wood and this is a wood that's so dense, according to Lansing, it weighs more than iron, and it sinks in water. And it can't be worked with normal hand tools. It's that hard.
Her frame has a double thickness compared to other ships.
And then this just blew me away.
Her bow where she meets the ice, each of the timbers had been fashioned from a single oak tree that was specially selected so that the natural growth follows the curve of the design. when assembled these pieces, they have a total thickness of four feet, four inches. That's where she meets the ice, four feet thick. And then all of this is powered by a three hundred and fifty power steam engine.
She has three massive masts, and then there's several more up in the front of the ship.
And she is beautiful.
She was built for carrying wealthy tourists into the Arctic for polar bear hunting trips.
She becomes a pet project in the shipyard. Each timber was hand-selected by men that grew up in the Norwegian ice.
Quite simply, she's the strongest wooden ship ever built in Norway, armored end to end against the wrong threat.
And the wrong threat?
Squeezing, and more about that soon.
Her original name was Polaris.
I find that fitting for a fancy hunting yacht.
Shackleton re-christens her to Endurance, keeping with the family motto, "By endurance, we conquer." as we heard at the top of the episode
On land, Shackleton, he lives into his family motto, and he spends two years trying to raise funding for the expedition. Many of the grants and the aid that he's promised time and time again fail to come through until finally a wealthy Scottish jute manufacturer, Sir James Caird, he agrees to fund Shackleton with 120,000.
In case you're wondering, jute is this plant fiber that gets spun into things like burlap and rope, I had to look that up myself.
I wasn't sure what jute was, and I was curious.
The government, they kick in another 50,000, and and then 5,000 comes from the Royal Geographic Society.
And an eye-opener for me here, Shackleton, he sells advanced rights to the commercial properties that the expedition might produce.
Think like, uh, books, motion pictures, and then a lecture tour to follow. And it all makes perfect sense. It's risky money if you're an investor because it's based on the assumption that Shackleton would survive, but his past expeditions built a lot of confidence in that ability, and it's exactly what leads us into the next critical, and in my view, the most important aspect of the story.
The Crew
Because they're about to spend 20 months together with no contact to the outside world.
No mail, no radio, no telegraphs, nothing.
Just 28 men together.
The ability to destroy one another.
Like the 1898 Belgica Antarctic expedition that became trapped in the ice,
Lansing says the following, " they walked laps around the ship to keep from losing their minds. They named the route Madhouse Promenade. It didn't work. One man died, one went deaf and dumb, and one slept jammed in a crevice of the ship because he was certain the others meant to kill him."
Shackleton here, he wants to unite his men with optimism, good nature, and a deep willingness to survive.
The core of the team is built from trusted men
That bravely follow Shackleton to the ends of the earth.
Second in command goes to Frank Wild, a small but powerfully built man with a soft-spoken voice and this easygoing personality. In fact, Wild balances out Shackleton's sometimes whimsical and explosive nature. I think of him as the yin to the yang.
Next up, Thomas Crean he's the second officer. He's a tall, plain-spoken Irishman with a long service record in the Royal Navy. Discipline was the name of the game for Crean.
Alfred Cheetham, he was a veteran Antarctic explorer. With this pleasant disposition, he becomes a tiny but solid rock amongst the team.
George Marston, he had joined as the expedition's 32-year-old artist. He's a chubby man with this boyish face, and one of a very few who Shackleton grows an increasing dislike for because he fears that his negative attitude is gonna spread like an infection throughout the crew.
Then rounding out the core here, Thomas McLeod.
He's a veteran of the sea who signs on as a seaman.
As a quick side note here, this is not in the book, McLeod's superstition Is gonna force him to pick up Queen Alexandra's Bible that Shackleton throws down in the snow because he believes that it's bad luck to abandon a Bible.
He carries it out, and it still survives today.
Back to the book here.
For the rest of the crew, Shackleton, he announces grand plans, and he seeks volunteers, those that are willing to work long hours, to be away from their families for months at a time, with salaries that were nothing more than just token payments.
In exchange, the real reward, the spirit of adventure and discovery, and the result, more than 5,000 people applied, including three women
Shackleton's interview process, quite odd but effective. If he didn't like how you looked, you were out. If he did, next step, interview, lasting no more than five minutes.
Shackleton, he made decisions with lightning speed, trusting his gut instincts.
Leonard Hussey signs on as a meteorologist because Shackleton thought he looked funny and he had just completed an expedition to Sudan, which really appeals to him.
So he'd have a lot of stories that he could share with the team.
He asked Dr. Alexander Macklin, one of the surgeons, why he was wearing glasses. His reply, "Many a wise face would look foolish without spectacles." Shackleton, he finds that quite amusing, and he hires him.
The physicist, Reginald James, he's asked about the state of his teeth, if he has varicose veins, if he was good-tempered, and if he could sing.
He wasn't hiring from the resume.
He was trying to get underneath of it, looking for good-natured men that matched his high degree of optimism.
From past expeditions, he knows this is one of the most important items his men must have. Cheerfulness, humor, and yes, the ability to sing, even if badly.
These are survival assets.
And Shackleton, he chooses well.
For those few that do crumble along the way, well, Shackleton is gifted at pulling them in close to his orbit, keeping their minds busy on specific tasks or playing and simply just working them to the bone.
When you're dog tired, it's hard to complain
With the crew set, Endurance is ready to leave when Britain declares war on Germany.
Shackleton is really torn. His life's work is on the line here. The last two years were pure hell getting everything ready.
Should he leave or should he volunteer for the war?
He's damned if he did, he's damned if he didn't.
His gut tells him what to do.
He consults with his financial backers and they agree the proper thing to do is offer the ship for the war.
Shackleton takes this decision to the crew. They all agree to be at the disposal of the government. A wire is sent offering Endurance to the war efforts.
The reply from Winston Churchill, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty, was just one word
Proceed.
Five days later, August eighth, nineteen fourteen, Endurance sails.
Their first mission, sail across the Atlantic towards Buenos Aires, Argentina. Shackleton and his second in command, who is Frank Wild, they stay behind.
They're working to tie up loose ends or more transparently, they were basically trying to secure more financing. They were really short on funds.
Meanwhile, on the Endurance, it's rough sailing on her first voyage.
The ship, it rolls really badly and it causes most of the scientists, who were also on their first voyage, to be terribly seasick.
Another first was the captain who was put in charge, Frank Worsley. Now, while Worsley proves to be an expert navigator for the next two years, his leadership is one of a very lighthearted nature, and his grip, well, it's generally weak.
Without any discipline, the morale of the crew, it's heading in the wrong direction towards destruction. Thankfully, Shackleton and Wild arrive a few days after Endurance ties up in Buenos Aires, and they turn the ship around, pun intended here, and they do it quite quickly.
The cook they had hired, he's found to be drunk.
Shackleton, he's not gonna tolerate this, and he's fired right away.
20 locals apply for the job.
Shackleton hires Charles Green, who is this squeaky-voiced man with a single mindset focused on his job, cooking, and then telling a few jokes here and there as well. This is the same man that two years from now, when they're on the ice, he's gonna frost a balloon so that somebody can have a birthday cake, that was the type of man that Shackleton wanted.
And it really makes me smile thinking about Charles Green. Imagine cutting into the frosting and a balloon pops.
Two other seamen are gonna be cut when they took a swing at Lionel Greenstreet, who was their first officer.
Shackleton hires William Bakewell, who had a wealth of experience, and he decides that this 26-year-old Canadian was sufficient enough to replace both of those fighters.
When one can do the work of two, that is what you do.
Blakewell, he ends up bringing his buddy Pierce Blackboro onto the boat in secret, and this is unknown to Shackleton for now, and more on this in just a moment.
Frank Hurley, he's gonna be hired sight unseen as the photographer. Hurley brings along the latest photo and motion picture gear, and his work that survives today is simply impressive
And then the last members to join the expedition, 69 sled dogs that were shipped from Canada. They stay in kennels on the ship's main deck.
Within a few days, all of this is complete. The bad actors are gone, along with the low morale.
October 26, 1914, Endurance, she sails towards South Georgia Island.
Now back to that stowaway.
About three days in here, they're having a really hard time trying to hide Blackboro wnd what they do is they stuff him into a locker that belongs to Ernest Holness. Holness was one of the ship's firemen. Holness, he comes off a watch, and he looks under his locker, and what does he see?
Two feet sticking out.
Well, let's just say the cat was out of the bag.
Blackboro, he's hauled in front of Shackleton, who berates this young Welshman, striking the fear of God into him.
Shackleton says, If we run out of food and anyone has to be eaten, you will be first.
Do you understand?" Blackboro, he nods and smiles and walks off to help the cook. He has almost no idea what this expedition is going to cost him.
Endurance sails on, finally arriving at Grytviken, which is the whaling station on South Georgia Island. She arrives November 5th, they're welcomed by all the whaling captains who didn't get a lot of outside visitors.
What Shackleton and the crew learn about the conditions of the water is grim. They're heading out to the Weddell Sea.
And Lansing, he describes the sea as a circular shape with land masses on all three sides. I see it almost as a cup. You enter at the top of that cup, and then the sea currents, they rotate in a clockwise manner, with mostly calm winds and freezing temperatures inside of that cup.
That causes ice to form year-round, even in the summer. This cup is nearly a million square miles of ice that gets squeezed together with no escape route. It all gets ground up against the Palmer Peninsula on the western side of the cup.
Now, as Shackleton is doing his homework here, he leans heavily on Thorolf Sorell.
I don't know if I said that exactly right. But he's one of the plant managers, and he has a lifetime of experience in the Weddell Sea. Seventeen months from now, when Shackleton returns, Sorell wouldn't even recognize him. But for now, the news, like I mentioned, it's grim because the sea is packed with ice.
So the crew, they wait. November and December are summer months in the Antarctic. Surely things have to improve.
Shackleton, he talks to every man on the island who has experience in the sea, and it's the same message over and over. They all think that he should wait till next year. Shackleton ignores that advice.
December fourth is their departure day. But they do hold for one extra day because mail was expected from the outside world.
However, it doesn't arrive.
On December 5th, with no mail, Endurance cuts off contact to the outside world and they leave South Georgia
As an interesting note, two hours after they leave, the mail would arrive.
But Shackleton, he knows the immense risk of what they're facing, and his plan here is to stay on the eastern side of the Weddell Sea, let's just say around the 3 or 4 o'clock position on the far outside edge of that clock, like almost if you were gonna fall off the clock, you wanted to stay right on the edge where the open water was if at all possible
He really wants to sneak through the ice into what is known as Vahsel bay.
And once they arrive in the bay, they're gonna set up camp.
However, two days later, they encounter the enemy for the first time, a small patch of ice.
Two hours later, heavy pack ice. For twelve hours, she crawls at a snail's pace looking for some sort of passage.
When they do find one, it's just a maze of twisting and turning, and it goes on and on like this for several weeks.
In the open sea, Endurance, she can cover something like two hundred miles a day.
By Christmas Eve, they're doing less than thirty. It was disappointing. But that doesn't stop them from celebrating the very next day.
Dinner, this sounds quite fantastic to me.
It's soup, herring, plum pudding, and sweets all washed down with stout and rum
Then those singing talents or lack thereof, they come into play with a heavy song fest all around.
This is really the magic of Shackleton keeping his crew lighthearted and really close together.
They are becoming brothers, and this is what builds endurance.
At the end of the first evening, First Officer Greenstreet writes the following in his diary: "Here endeth another Christmas Day. I wonder under what circumstance our next one will be spent. Temperature, thirty degrees."
Lansing says he would be shocked, and I certainly agree
The new year brings a gift for them in better ice conditions as they enter open water.
With whales on both sides of them, they're steaming along the coast with land in sight. Things are looking really good. Spirits are flying high Vashel Bay is just two hundred miles away.
The next day, January 16th, Endurance runs into heavy ice.
They're pounded by gale force winds, and they seek protection behind an iceberg
Where they stay pinned down for two days.
January 18th, they can finally start creeping forward 10 miles that day.
They see open water ahead, or so they think. As they go in, the floes, they're thick, but very soft, and it's mainly just snow. Endurance, it's floating in this soupy mush, and it closes in all around the ship like a pudding.
First Officer Greenstreet pushes the engine full speed ahead between two massive ice floes. Progress is slow.
That evening, Worsley writes in his diary, “We therefore lay to for a while to see if the pack opens at all when this northeast wind ceases."
For six days, they sit.
Mother Nature is trapping Endurance in her ice and gale force winds.
By January 24th, the men are shocked.
Ice for as far as the eye can see all around them.
Worsley tells us from his diary, "We must possess ourselves in patience till a southerly gale occurs or the ice opens in its own sweet will."
They have two key magic tickets here that need to take place.
The first, they need the wind to blow them out, or the second, they need the ice to open.
As the Weddell Sea churns slowly clockwise, possibly cracks will develop and they can slip out.
And that happens at midnight, an opening. It's 15 feet wide. As the crack grows, so does their hope. By mid morning, it's a quarter mile wide. You can hit open water with a stone.
The sails are put up and the engine is brought full steam. For three hours, she leaned against the ice with all of her might and never moved a foot.
Never moved a foot.
Shackleton, he calls off the attempt.
Endurance is beset.
And I like that Like that word beset, meaning trouble or to be surrounded on all sides.
I break it into smaller words, be and set.
It's like the ice saying endurance, you beset in me.
Anyways, that's a bit childish.
Let's keep going here.
The man in charge of the motor who would later become the storekeeper was Thomas Orde-Lees.
And he puts it best.
“We are like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar.”
And like that almond, Endurance is armored against the wrong threat.
The wrong threat, squeezing of the ice.
Earlier in the show, we had talked about the construction of the Endurance, how she was built to carry wealthy tourists around the Arctic in loose ice.
But when the buyer backed out, Shackleton, he got a deal on her. The seller knew his fame and really wanted to contribute towards this expedition because it would be a really big feather in their cap to have the ship's name in the paper with his success.
Now, the proper ship going into the Weddell Sea, it has bottom sides that are shaped like a bowl so that if it becomes stuck in the ice, the pressure, it's gonna pop it up and out onto the ice, then it'll just sit there.
Endurance is like that almond. It's surrounded on all sides by the ice, and it says, "Welcome home, boys."
The crew's spirits are high. They keep themselves busy. At the end of January, they fiddle around with the radio that's on board, but they don't have any luck.
This is a newer technology at the time, and they're not really surprised when it doesn't work.
The general feeling amongst the crew is that the sea, it's gonna open up at any time.
And again, in February, they do have another glimmer of hope here, or so they think when a crack opens up near Endurance.
The men, they saw, they chisel, and they pick the ice away from the ship.
They work sixteen to eighteen hours a day, cutting a lane that's about a hundred and fifty yards long through the ice floes for Endurance.
Full steam is raised on the three hundred and fifty horsepower engine, and again and again, she slams into the ice, throwing waves of water up onto the ice, rolling side to side. Each time she slips backwards, the men, they saw, they chop, they strain to pull the ice away from her.
Greenstreet, he writes the following in his diary, "If we do get jammed here for the winter, we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that we did our darnedest to try to get out."
Shackleton watches.
The coal pile is shrinking fast. The men feed the engine. The juice is not worth the squeeze, and he orders a shutdown.
Another thing that starts shutting down is the sun.
And for the first time, on February seventeenth, the sun sets below the horizon.
This ends their twenty-four hours of daylight, and it's a clear signal that summer is about to draw her curtains.
The men continue to battle the ice every single day.
Cook Green, he works all day long, and then he scrambles out to the ice so that he can pitch in.
And this is the scene at the time, each man doing their normal job and then chopping ice.
Yet, after over a month in the same spot, Shackleton, on February twenty-fourth, finally admits they are stuck, and they're gonna have to spend the winter on the ice.
He cancels the twenty-four-hour sea watches, and for the next eight months, Endurance is gonna be attacked by the ice.
Silently at first.
Shackleton, he is tormented in private.
As the leader of the crew, he ruminates about seeing land And if they would have just camped when they had the chance, they would not be in this spot.
Plus another silent but big thing is happening right under their feet.
Remember how I told you that the Weddell Sea rotates in a clockwise motion?
Well, their navigator, uh, technically his title is captain, but I call him navigator because each day he uses his sextant to calculate their position on Earth.
And Worsley, the navigator, he reports back to Shackleton that they're moving anywhere from two to three miles a day, mostly in a north or northwest direction.
And the damning news here, and this really haunts Shackleton, is that they're only 60 miles away from Vashel Bay, a few hours travel in open seas.
Tormented in private, but in public view, Shackleton, he's upbeat and he's positive.
In fact, in my view, he doubles down on bringing his men together
And what they do is they clear space on the ship. They do this by building igloos for the dogs out on the ice, or dogloos as they call them.
I find that very fitting.
The cargo hold, it gets cleared out for a common space for meals and for leisure time.
And at eight hundred and twenty-five square feet, they call this glorious space The Ritz, and that just really makes me smile.
Harry McNish, the carpenter, he makes more comfortable sleeping cubicles for the boys. And the ship, it keeps them really cozy and warm for right now, and life just slows down.
Daily tasks, they consume about three hours a time, and then they turn their attention to daily hunting of the seals and the penguins that were all around them.
The meat that they gather is used to feed the men and the dogs, and then the blubber is used for fuel for the stoves.
And these animals, the seals and the penguins that is, they have no fear. On the ice, there's no natural predators, and it's easy just to walk up behind them and club 'em on the head.
In the late summer months, the seals and the penguins, like I mentioned, they're everywhere.
Out on the ice, the crew, they play soccer, and they hold these dog-sighting competitions to see who can bring back the most meat and blubber for the day.
By April 10th, they've collected an amazing 5,000 pounds of meat and blubber.
As the days start to slip away, so do those animals.
They migrate to warmer temperatures.
Endurance, she drifts with the ice.
By May 2nd, they have moved from the 6:00 position to the 7:00 position on the clock.
It may not sound like a lot, but it was somewhere around 130 miles.
Like the animals moving to the warmer climate to escape the 17-degree below temperatures, so does the crew.
With almost perpetual nighttime now, the men, they draw even closer together. There was very little depression on board the Endurance.
The coming of the polar night somehow drew the men closer together.
And what they do, this is really fun, they hold mock trials, such as when Worsley, who was now given the nickname Wuzzles he was tried for robbing a Presbyterian church of a trouser button out of the offering bag and then turning it to base in ignoble use.
They assigned a judge, a prosecutor, a defender, and jury roles.
And Wuzzles, while, yes, he was found guilty after trying to bribe the judge with a drink when the trial was over.
And what should have possibly gone on trial here were the haircuts they were giving one another in their haircutting competitions.
And I'm sure they came out delightful and had a lot of fun with that.
The Saturday evening ritual was to have a drink of grog, and grog is, uh, rum that's cut with water and the men, they hold up their drinks, and the toast went, "To our sweethearts and wives." And then the chorus would add, "May they never meet."
I still get a good laugh out of that every time I read that or say it out loud.
Sunday nights, they were extra special.
The men, they listened to music from the, uh, hand-cranked gramophone for about an hour or so, as they wrote in their diaries.
And as a quick side note here, Wild, he had ordered 5,000 needles, but he forgot to write gramophone on the order slip.
And when they're out at sea here, they go to open that case of needles, and they're thunderstruck 'cause they see 5,000 sewing needles.
So thus they only had one pack of actual gramophone needles, and those wore out real quickly.
So their music time was extra special 'cause they didn't have the proper equipment.
Now if we go back to the crew here, if you were brave, outside on the deck, nature put on a light show
The scene from the deck of the Endurance was often fascinatingly beautiful.
In clear weather, if the moon was out, it swept in bold, high circles through the starlit skies for days on end, casting a soft, pale light over the floes. And at other times, there were breathtaking displays of the aurora australis, the Antarctic equivalent of the northern lights. Incredible sunbursts of green and blue and silver shot up from the horizon into the blue-black sky, shimmering iridescent colors that glinted off the rock-hard ice below
That sounds quite incredible.
Being trapped on the ice, life was really good for the men.
Shackleton, he kept their spirits really high.
They were engaged in daily tasks, hunting, playing games, and making up new entertainment.
All they really had to do was wait until summer and pray that the ice would open up.
But the sea, She was unwrapping her chocolate bar. The bite is going to be a slow crunch on the almond that's trapped in the middle
June 28th, Worsley records the following in his diary. " At times during the night, a distant, rich, booming note is heard, changing at times to a long creaking groan, which seems to carry a menacing tone. It starts up gradually, but stops abruptly, and sounds best in the distance. The greater the distance, the better the sound."
Outside, for five days in a row, the barometer drops. A monster storm is brewing, and that is where we'll leave the show for today.
For the first time in our podcast history, we're gonna split the work up into two episodes, and here's why.
I debated on covering everything in one really long episode, but there's so much good material in this beautifully crafted book.
I really didn't wanna just gloss over this epic survival of Shackleton and his crew. They still have a long ways to go.
Next time, we'll see Endurance be chewed up by the ice, and the real endurance is seen in the men as they risk their lives to row their lifeboats for seven days in freezing temperatures to a tiny, inhospitable island.
Shackleton then captains one of perhaps the most legendary and dangerous sea crossings in maritime history, only to face a heartbreaking decision that forces him to be a mountaineer with gear that you wouldn't give your worst enemy.
The highs and the lows in this book are real, and you can feel them.
I'm looking forward to our next episode when we bring Shackleton and the men home.
This is where we'll leave the episode for today. If you like the show and you wanna help out, you can leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.
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Many thanks in advance, and I'm looking forward to our next episode.
Until next time, make it a beautiful day in the neighborhood, my friend