"Endurance" by Alfred Lansing
Above: "Endurance" - Alfred Lansing - 353 pages. I completed reading this book today.
"Endurance," published in 1959 and reissued frequently is a well told tale about how a leader can effectively manage a group under circumstances unimaginable to most people. It is a great book for young people to read in an age where there are more incentives to be narcissistic than to be selfless, where selflessness and not narcissism remains a key trait required to enable human progress.
In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization, South Georgia Island. In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age (adapted from Amazon.com summary).
Polar exploration captured the world's imagination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Before reading "Endurance," I had read two great books about efforts to reach the North Pole.
In 1879, an expedition financed by John C. Bennett, Executive Editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and led by USN Lieutenant Commander George W. De Long, sought to reach the North Pole, departing on the USS Jeanette from San Francisco. The ship, and its thirty crew, became trapped in the ice packs of the Bering Sea and was crushed by ice almost two years later in the East Siberian Sea. In an effort to reach Siberia half the men died. My review of "In the Kingdom of Ice," by Hampton Sides, an account of the De Long expedition, is here:
I was triggered to read "Endurance," an Antarctica expedition, on my recent adventure cruise to Antarctica. Many of my L'Austral shipmates had already read the book. The "Austral" visited "ports of call" on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Shackleton's ordeal occurred mostly on the east side of the peninsula in the Weddel Sea. Shackleton's furthest point south before the Endurance became entrapped in ice was about 65 degrees south latitude, the same latitude where the Austral was cruising on other side of the peninsula. The Antarctic Circle, for reference, is at 66.5 degrees south latitude.
It sounds a bit absurd for me to compare my expedition on L'Austral with Shackleton's on the Endurance. I spent my Antarctica time in a luxury, climate-controlled cabin with a hot water shower. I dined on five-star French cuisine daily. Shackleton and his men spent most of their Antarctic adventure in tents on moving ice floes or in the holds of small lifeboats at subzero temperatures, eating penguins and seals. Still, seeing the Antarctic land and seascapes, even in luxury conditions, gives more insight to the amazing Shackleton story than not having been there at all.
The Greely expedition to Ellesmere Island and DeLong's voyage into the Beaufort Sea thirty years earlier each ended with a majority of the expeditioners losing their lives. That's what sets Shackleton's expedition apart. He left the UK in 1914 with 27 scientists and seamen and astoundingly brought all of them back to England. Shackleton's men diarized conversations about how they hoped theirs would not be a repeat of the Greely expedition, a similar "journey" while stranded on slow moving ice floes.
Shackleton had begun his preparations for the expedition conceived to cross overland from one side of Antarctica to the other in 1910. By the time he was ready to depart in 1914, WWI had just begun. Shackleton was fully prepared to scratch the voyage, but The Admiralty told him to proceed with his plans. Shackleton and his men were out of contact with the world for almost three years, so, focused as they were on their own life-threatening ordeal, they had no knowledge of how their countrymen were fairing at Ypres and Somme.
"Endurance" is a tutorial on leadership. The hardship conditions experienced by Shackleton and his men could have, at any point during their ordeal, resulted in accidental deaths, disputes amongst the men, or squandering of food and resources, and just plain bad tactical decision making. Yet Ernest Shackleton, with his super ordinary commitment to his mission and his men, kept it all together.
The other day I listened to my sixteen-year-old grandson talking about the video game Red Dawn Redemption. In order to succeed at the game, the player was required at various intervals to make choices with a spectrum of moral and tactical options. An evil or duplicitous decision might get you short term gain, but there would be consequences in game world for a player known to be mendacious or short sighted.
I'm surprised they haven't made a video game of the Shackleton expedition. Shackleton had to make so many moral and tactical choices along the way, any one of which, though well intentioned could have doomed the expedition. Here's my template for "Shackleton - The Video Game:" A player would have accomplish the game in four phases:
1. With the Endurance trapped in ice only a day's sail from the Antarctic coast, the game player would have to keep the men positive and productive as the ice flow moved north during the southern hemisphere winter. The game player would have to rely on primitive navigational instruments to determine the ice floe's progress. The game player would have to keep his charges sane and fed through the cold, dark polar winter. Card games? singing fests? Soccer in the moonlight? Seal hunting? The player would have to learn to deal with a minority of the crew who were not so selfless as the majority.
2. Life on the floe after the break-up and sinking of the Endurance. Challenges for the game player: Moving your camp, including dragging your lifeboats along the ice, to locate a better floe, when your current ice floe "home" starts to crack. Endure sub-zero blizzards in flimsy tents on the ice surface. Augment dwindling food supplies in subzero temperatures. Make navigation observations in iffy weather. Decide: move to the small boats or stay on a floe when reaching open water. If taking to the water, keep the small boats, which, under sail, travel at different speeds, together in heavy seas or separate and hope for the best. Navigate a course, in the stormy waters of the Drake Passage, with tentative navigational inputs, to the nearest land, Elephant Island. On reaching, seemingly miraculously, Elephant Island, find a landing spot without getting torn up on the rocks in heavy surf.
3. Two thirds of the crew remain on Elephant Island while Shackleton and five others sail the Drake Passage on a twenty-two-foot boat for the human inhabited South Georgia Island. Who does Shackleton appoint as leader among those who remain stranded on Elephant Island? After four months of being stranded, running out of supplies, and fearing Shackleton did not succeed in his attempt to reach South Georgia Island, should some of stranded seamen make a run on the remaining lifeboat for Deception Island to the northwest, another whale station? Note: L'Austral made a stop at Deception Island. Expedition goers visited the old whale station buildings.
4. Shackleton on attempt to reach civilization at South Georgia Island: Three-week ordeal, storms, heavy seas, to reach South Georgia Island, sailing from Elephant Island. Sails up? Down? Ride the current in the storm? Assign all crew members to bail leaving none to steer/navigate? Cross from landing side of the mountainous South Georgia island under seemingly impossible circumstances. Overnight at peak and possibly freeze to death? Or slide down 1000 vertical foot glacier before sunset? Mount the rescue effort for the men at Elephant Island despite the risk of sea ice preventing access? or wait? The game ends with a successful outcome when Shackleton rescues his stranded crew on Elephant Island.
"Endurance," published in 1959 and reissued frequently is a well told tale about how a leader can effectively manage a group under circumstances unimaginable to most people. It is a great book for young people to read in an age where there are more incentives to be narcissistic than to be selfless, where selflessness and not narcissism remains a key trait required to enable human progress.