Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage — Book Review

The Story Behind Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Ernest Shackleton set sail for Antarctica in December 1914. His goal was simple to state and nearly impossible to do: walk across the continent, coast to coast, through the South Pole. No one had ever done it.

He never got the chance to try. His ship, the Endurance, got trapped in pack ice before it even reached land. It drifted stuck for ten months, until the ice finally crushed it. The ship sank in November 1915 — a full year before any of the crew would see home again.

There was no radio that worked that far south. No plane could reach them. No one on earth knew where they were. For close to two years, 28 men were about as cut off from the world as anyone could be in 1915.

Shackleton failed at the one job he set out to do. He never crossed Antarctica. But every single one of his 28 men survived — including a stretch where six of them sailed 800 nautical miles in a 22-foot open boat, through some of the worst seas on the planet, just to find someone who could send a rescue.

This is a review of Alfred Lansing's Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage — the story of a mission that failed completely, and turned into one of the great leadership stories anyway.

The Story

The Endurance got stuck in the Weddell Sea in January 1915, before it had even reached the coast Shackleton needed. For ten months, the ship just sat there, locked in ice, drifting wherever the ice drifted.

By October 1915, the ice had crushed the hull. Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship. The crew moved onto the ice itself, camping on a frozen floe with whatever they could carry. A month later, on November 21, the ship finally went under. Frank Hurley, the expedition's photographer, got a picture of it happening. It's the picture most people know from this story.

For the next five months, the men lived on the ice. They ate seals and penguins. They had no fixed camp — the floe they were standing on kept drifting and breaking apart underneath them. At one point, in February 1916, it was Leap Year Day, and the crew — starving, stuck, with no idea when or if they'd get out — made a point of eating three full meals to mark the extra day.

When the ice finally broke up enough in April 1916, they launched three small lifeboats and sailed to Elephant Island — the first solid ground they'd stood on in almost a year and a half. But Elephant Island was uninhabited and far from any shipping route. No one would find them there by accident.

So Shackleton picked five men, and the six of them set out in the James Caird — a 22-foot lifeboat — for South Georgia Island, 800 nautical miles away, across some of the roughest ocean in the world. They made it in 17 days. Then Shackleton and two others had to cross South Georgia's mountains on foot — unmapped terrain, no proper climbing gear — to reach a whaling station on the other side.

It still took four attempts and three and a half months before a ship could get through the ice to rescue the 22 men left behind on Elephant Island. On August 30, 1916, it finally happened. Everyone survived.

The Leader

Shackleton failed at his actual job. He never crossed Antarctica. If you judged him only on what he set out to do, the expedition was a complete loss.

But look at what he did instead, once the plan fell apart.

The original idea, after the ship sank, was to march the crew across the ice, dragging the lifeboats behind them, until they reached open water. They tried it. After a few days, they'd covered less than two miles. The ice was too broken up to cross on foot. Shackleton called it off and set up camp instead — a hard thing to do, because it meant admitting the plan wasn't working, in front of 27 men who were relying on him to have a plan.

When it came time to go for help, Shackleton didn't send someone else on the 800-mile boat journey. He went himself, and he picked who came with him. He left his second-in-command, Frank Wild, in charge of the 22 men staying behind on Elephant Island — the harder job, arguably, since it meant waiting with no way of knowing if help was even coming.

And there's the Leap Year meal. Starving, trapped, with no fixed date for rescue, the crew still marked February 29 with three full meals instead of their usual rations. That wasn't Shackleton's decision alone, but it's the kind of thing a crew only does when its leader has kept some sense of normal life intact — routines, small celebrations, something other than pure survival. Losing that is often how crews break down psychologically, long before they run out of food.

None of this got Shackleton across Antarctica. It's not what he set out to prove. It turned out to matter more.

The Route

Source: Alamy

[MAP: original SVG recreation — waypoints: departure Dec 5 1914, trapped in ice Jan 18 1915, abandoned Oct 27 1915, sank Nov 21 1915, drift to Elephant Island Nov 1915–Apr 1916, James Caird to South Georgia Apr–May 1916, final rescue Aug 30 1916. Source line credits the expedition's documented historical timeline.]

A map doesn't usually add much to a book review. This one does. Reading the distances is one thing. Seeing them — how far Elephant Island is from anywhere, how far South Georgia is from Elephant Island — is another.

My View

I liked this book a lot. Five out of five.

The first thing worth saying — this isn't a story. These are facts. Everything in this book actually happened to actual people. That changes how you read it. You're not waiting to see if the author sticks the landing. You're watching real men decide, in real time, whether they live or die.

What struck me most was the survival itself. From the moment the ship got stuck in the ice, nothing went their way. Cold, food running out, no way to stay clean, disease, moments that came close to death — one after another. The crew were, in every sense, superhuman. Every one of them was brave. Conditions like that can break a person mentally. These men used whatever they had left, right down to the last bit of it, just to stay alive.

And there's a detail that says more than any speech could. Stranded on Elephant Island, one of the crew, Perce Blackborow, had gangrene in his toes from frostbite. The two doctors on the expedition operated on him with chloroform and whatever instruments they could sterilise in boiling seawater — inside a hut made from an upturned lifeboat, heated with a blubber stove. They performed actual surgery, in the Antarctic, with almost nothing. And it worked.

But the person who stayed with me the most is Shackleton. He went through everything the rest of them went through. The difference is, he never lost his ability to decide. Not once. That's the real definition of a leader — not staying calm because nothing is wrong, but still being able to think clearly when everything is.

I read the book first, then watched the two-part TV drama — I wanted to see what I'd already pictured in my head. It helped. But honestly, this story deserves more than a two-part drama. This is a two- or three-part Hollywood film, done properly, with the budget the story actually earns.

What This Is Actually About

This book isn't really about Antarctica. It's about what a person can survive when there's no other option.

Most of us never get tested this way. We don't get stuck on ice with no radio and no rescue date. That's probably a good thing. But it also means most of us go through life without knowing what we're actually capable of carrying.

Shackleton's crew found out. Not by choosing it — nobody signs up for two years of near-starvation and frostbite surgery on purpose. They found out because the choice was taken away from them. Survive, or don't. There was no third option.

I wrote about a different version of this in an earlier piece, on suffering that people choose rather than have forced on them: "I still believe suffering is necessary if you want to build something that lasts." Shackleton's crew didn't choose their suffering the way that piece describes. But the same question sits underneath both — what's left in a person once everything comfortable has been taken away, and whether anything useful remains once it has.

Read more: Suffering: The Price of a Bet You Might Lose

The reason this book stays with you isn't the ice, or the ship, or even the rescue. It's the question it leaves behind: if everything was taken from you tomorrow, would anything be left standing?

Further Reading

1. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing — Get your copy

The book this review is about. Lansing's account, built from crew diaries and interviews with survivors, of the Endurance expedition from departure to rescue.

2. South by Ernest Shackleton — Get your copy

Shackleton's own account of the expedition, written shortly after he returned. Worth reading against Lansing's version — see what the man himself chose to include, and what he left out.

3. Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition by Caroline Alexander — Get your copy

A companion account built heavily around Frank Hurley's original expedition photographs. Same story, more visual — useful if the images matter to you as much as the text did.

4. In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick — Get your copy

The true story of the whaleship Essex, sunk by a whale in 1820, and the crew's survival at sea afterward. A very different setting, the same core question: what does a person do when the plan is gone and only survival is left.

5. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer — Get your copy

Krakauer's account of the 1996 Everest disaster, where he was one of the climbers. Where Shackleton is a leader who kept deciding well under pressure, this book is largely about decisions that went the other way — useful as a contrast.

6. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand — Get your copy

The story of Louis Zamperini, a WWII airman who survived a plane crash, weeks adrift at sea, and two years in Japanese POW camps. Different war, different decade, same test of what a person has left when nothing is provided for them.

7. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl — Get your copy

Frankl's account of surviving Nazi concentration camps, and the psychological framework he built from it afterward. The most direct answer, from a very different setting, to the same question this book leaves you with.

8. Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read — Get your copy

The account of the 1972 Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes, and the 72 days that followed. Closest parallel to Shackleton's crew — a group, not a lone survivor, forced to keep deciding together with no rescue in sight.

Happy Reading!