However, these men bear no responsibility whatever for what follows. I am extremely proud of my association with them.

Thus most of the survivors of this astounding adventure worked with me, graciously and with a remarkable degree of objectivity, to re-create in the pages that follow as true a picture of the events as we could collectively produce. The same patient willingness marked the numerous letters in which these men replied to the many questions which arose. In addition to making these diaries available to me, almost all the surviving members of the expedition submitted to long hours, even days, of interviewing with a courtesy and cooperativeness for which my grateful appreciation is hardly an adequate repayment. In all cases, however, the exact language, spelling, and punctuation have been preserved just as they were originally written. Others were kept in very small notebooks in tiny script. Some were written in bookkeepers’ ledgers in appropriately large handwriting. These logs are a wonderfully strange assortment of documents, smudged with the smoke of blubber oil, wrinkled from being waterlogged and then dried out. In fact, the diaries contain much more information than could be included in this book.

It is amazing how thorough these diaries are, considering the conditions under which they were kept. Read ExcerptĮvery effort has been made to portray the events exactly as they occurred, and to record as accurately as possible the reactions of the men who lived them.įor this purpose, a wealth of material has been generously made available to me, most notably the painstakingly detailed diaries of virtually every expedition member who kept one. 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.

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. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. 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. 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. Experience one of the greatest adventure stories of the modern age in this New York Times bestseller: the harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton's 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole.

Endurance lansing