endurance shackleton's incredible voyage alfred lansing

I thought this book was a terrific mix of facts, drama and real journal entries. I've been on a 4 hour ocean kayak trip and even that felt intimidating, I can't even imagine an open boat voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island with limited food, terrible conditions, clothing that's completely inadequate and moldy, cold sleeping bags. The fact that not a single sailor died is flabbergasting, the story kept evolving to the point where it almost felt like fiction.

This astonishing tale of survival by Shackleton and all twenty-seven of his men for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas, as Time magazine put it, 'defined heroism.' Alfred Lansing's brilliantly narrated book has long been acknowledged as the definitive account of the Endurance's fateful trip'- … ( more)Ībsolutely incredible, there aren't enough superlatives to describe the harsh conditions Shackleton and his crew endured during this voyage. It would end only after a near-miraculous journey by Shackleton and a skeleton crew through over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization. But for Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men the ordeal had barely begun.

For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed. In January 1915, after battling its way for six weeks through a thousand miles of pack ice and now only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. 'Bound for Antarctica, where polar explorer Ernest Shackleton planned to cross on foot the last uncharted continent, the Endurance set sail from England in August 1914.

Endurance shackleton's incredible voyage alfred lansing