Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage

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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Some books grip you from the get-go, but, Endurance is a different beast. It grips you and then, it clenches its fist around your throat and never lets go. I just finished what I can only call one of the greatest nonfiction thrillers ever written. It’s the best real-life story I’ve ever read. Perfect in structure. Relentless in pace. Breath-holding in every sense.

To call Endurance a rollercoaster would insult Alfred Lansing. His writing doesn’t rise and fall. In fact, it holds you in a permanent state of tension – you know that electric stillness before something terrible and beautiful happens.

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🎧If you’d like to listen to the audio version of this book review, you can check out the podcast episodes here: Endurance Part I and Endurance Part II

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The Making of a Timeless Classic

I first came across Endurance years ago in a glowing Wall Street Journal review. I bookmarked it, forgot about it, then finally picked it up. Within ten pages, I knew this was no ordinary survival story.

Running across seven parts and 350-plus pages, Endurance is a book to be absorbed, cherished and not skimmed. It’s been over sixty years since it was first published and to this day it stands unshaken.

Oddly enough, this was Lansing’s first and last book. He never wrote another. No other story, it seems, came close to matching the madness of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s doomed expedition to cross Antarctica.

Lansing went to England, interviewed the surviving crew, read their diaries and pieced together what might be the most detailed account of human endurance ever written.

After a brief buzz in 1959 when it was first published, the book vanished from the readers’ radar. Two decades later, it resurfaced. And stayed. Lansing, however, was not alive to savor his work’s phoenix-like comeback; he had passed away in January 1975. Nathaniel Philbrick summed it up best in his 2013 introduction:

“For an author, posterity is the toughest of proving grounds. Only a handful of books are so firmly connected to the timeless underpinnings of life that they survive into the future. Endurance, by Lansing, is one of those books.”

Nathaniel Philbrick, Endurance (2013)

The Ice Closes In

Lansing opens with the announcement that the ship is to be abandoned. No warm-up, no buildup. You go straight into despair. The year is 1915 – an era when there are no rescue choppers and no smart comms. Shackleton and his 27 men are stuck in the Weddell Sea – a frozen hell stretching from horizon to horizon.

Shackleton’s main motivation to undertake this expedition was to earn fame and riches. He wanted to become the first person to cross the Antarctic continent from west to east. The ship, bought from a Norwegian builder for $67,000, set sail from Buenos Aires on October 26, 1914.

Lansing plants dread early. He writes lines that hum with foreboding, like “…by sunset the land had dropped from sight,” or Shackleton’s joke to a stowaway: “If the rations run out, you’ll be the first to be eaten.” That’s Lansing’s way of warning the reader – brace yourself.

By January 1915, Endurance was locked fast in 18-foot-thick ice. For ten months, the crew fought the odds, hoping the ice would break. It didn’t. On October 25, 1915, Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship. Less than a month later, the Endurance sank beneath the ice, not to be seen again until 2022 – 107 years later.

Survival Becomes a Way of Life

That’s the factual part. But Lansing’s gift lies in what he does with the facts. He turns survival into literature. He makes you smell the blubber smoke, feel the frostbite creep, hear the groan of the shifting floes. You taste the misery and the hopelessness.

After abandoning ship, the men camped on the ice in what can only be described as treacherous conditions. They rationed food and hunted seals, sometimes baby seals. Shackleton ordered the killing of sledge dogs to save on supplies. I cringed and squirmed at the thought of it, but, Lansing doesn’t dramatize the moment. He simply shows how survival rewires morality.

“The rapidity with which one can completely change one’s ideas…and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful.”

Alfred Lansing

What fascinates me is Shackleton himself. He wasn’t an ordinary man. He had this strange mix of arrogance and optimism – the belief that fate itself would bend for him. “Defeat was a reflection of personal inadequacy,” Lansing writes. It’s that steel or perhaps, delusion that kept his men alive.

Life on the floes was monotonous. The men looked forward to meals not for the food, but for the break in time. The rations were miserable – hoosh (a stew of whatever they could find), biscuits and powdered milk. When the seal meat went putrid, they killed the remaining dogs and ate them. Lansing stops short of delving into the graphic details which somehow makes these passages harder to read.

By April 1916, the ice was splitting beneath them. Shackleton made another critical call – three small lifeboats, open to the sea, to reach the distant Elephant Island. The scenes Lansing paints here are staggering: men rowing through sleet and blizzards, their clothes soaked, hands bleeding, half-mad from exhaustion. You can almost hear the flapping of the torn sails.

The 800-Mile Gamble

For the next four months, 22 men survived on that godforsaken island, while Shackleton and five sailed for an unbelievable 800-mile voyage in an open boat to South Georgia Island – their only hope of rescue.

The last third of Endurance is pure adrenaline. Lansing’s storytelling hits its peak here. The 22-foot coffin-sized lifeboat, the James Caird, is hurled through the Drake Passage – the most violent stretch of ocean on Earth. Here, winds hit 150 mph and waves rise 80 feet at regular frequency. The men onboard the Caird are freezing, starving and half-delirious. Yet Lansing maintains a surgeon’s precision in every detail.

Lansing’s writing hit me hard. I realized something:  comfort is civilization’s greatest illusion. 

The sleeping bags onboard the Caird became rotten. Their legs were raw from saltwater boils. Their hands were cracked, bleeding, and frozen. They lost their sea anchor mid-storm. At any moment, the boat could have capsized. But they rowed on — stubborn, unkillable.

“No matter what position they assumed – sitting, reclining or lying in their sleeping bags – the struggle against the motion of the boat was ceaseless.”

Alfred Lansing

On May 10, 1916, after 522 days at sea and ice, Shackleton and his men reached South Georgia – the same island they had left nearly two years earlier. But their ordeal wasn’t over. The six men were too weak to sail around the island, so three of them – Shackleton, Worsley and Crean – crossed its unmapped, mountainous interior on foot, with no gear, no light and no sleep.

They reached the whaling station at the Stromness Bay after 36 sleepless hours. Shackleton returned to rescue the men left behind on Elephant Island. Not one had died. That’s the miracle. That’s Endurance.