Endurance: Shackleton's lost ship is found in Antarctic
bbc.com
bbc.com
For those who don't know about this expedition, NatGeo has a good video about it on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgh_77TtX5I
Well, he wasn't wrong. Reminds me of some job openings.
It's right up there with:
You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED.
I've been reading it to my son. It's got so many lessons on leadership, grit, foresight, courage etc. Very inspiring.
One thing that struck me was how sharp a judge of character Shackleton was. He picked the members of his crew after short or no interviews and was vindicated in his all his selections. That must have been a skill learned from time in the real world. Something which might be scorned on today for being biased or something else like that.
He was manipulative in certain ways though I think all those moves were part of his leadership style. He also had personality quirks which jeopardised the situation on more than one occasion. Lansings book mentions an incident where her refused to gather meat when it was available because of some misguided idea of interpreting caution as a form of surrender or weakness that was anathema to his character and ego. He pulled through of course but there are moments when even a few of the the most loyal members of his crew started to have second thoughts about his leadership. I've been reading the book to my young son. He thinks of Shackleton as a hero but was "angry" at him when I read the part about dropping the meat.
I think anyone with an interest in sailing or maritime navigation will appreciate Worsley's first-hand account of the crossing from Elephant Island to South Georgia in a modified lifeboat[0]. Worsley covers the subsequent crossing of South Georgia's mountainous interior in great detail as well.
And often left out from popular accounts is mention of the Ross Sea Party[1], who endured terrible conditions on the other side of the Antarctic continent to ensure that Shackleton and his crew would have had enough supplies to survive the final stretches coming from the other side of the continent.
"Shackleton's Argonauts" by Frank Hurley (photographer of Endurance) is another good one if you can find a copy.
First, the Endurance is trapped by ice for half a year. Then she is crushed by the ice, and the crew camps on the ice. Then they start a 500 km march, over the ice, carrying the lifeboats, to reach an island. After over half a year (!), they finally decide to start a 160 km journey across the open sea in the three lifeboats. The crew of 27 manages to reach Elephant Island after 5 days on the open sea in wet clothes at temperatures below -20 degrees. The island is completely uninhabited and there is little hope to ever be rescued from there, so they build a new boat out of the three lifeboats, and Shackleton and five other men set out for a 1,300 km journey to South Georgia, which they know has a small whaling station. Here is an image of the boat [0]. This journey itself has is its own Wikipedia article [1] and is considered one of the greatest boat journeys ever accomplished. The rest of the crew is left behind on Elephant Island. Against all odds, they actually reach South Georgia after 17 days in extremely bad conditions. However, they are on the wrong side of the island. So Shackleton decides to cross the island by foot, with 2 others. It's a 40 km journey across a mountain range nearly 3,000 meters high [2]. They have no map and improvise their route. In what was actually the first confirmed crossing of South Georgia, they reach the whaling station after walking, without stop, day and night, for nearly 2 days. Just imagine being placed at that whaling station, at the end of the world, and suddenly seeing these 3 half-dead men come out of the mountains. They pick up the remaining crew on the other end of the island by boat. Then, Shackleton immediately tries to rescue the rest of his crew which is still 1,300 km back on Elephant Island (he has no idea whether they are still alive). This takes another 3 months and multiple ships. Only the fourth attempt is successful. But in September 1916, over 1.5 years after the Endurance was trapped in ice, Shackleton has saved his entire crew. Everybody survived.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_James_Caird#/med...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_James_Caird
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Panorama...
With faith in God (and in Shackleton)
They were both amateurs in many ways compared to the Norwegians.
Shackleton was a great leader, and managed to survive despite of his failures. But he failed in 3 distinctive ways in the same way as Scott.
* Not understanding the importance of raw meat as a treatment for scurvy
* Not understanding that skis are better than snow shoes
* Not understanding how to use dogs, preferring to man-haul their sleds
Analogously - It is not the failed project that is heroically saved in last minute by a hacker hero that is the best execution. It is the project that delivers on time without anyone noticing any problems.
It seems significant that Shackleton's ship was so carefully constructed to endure, yet busted anyway. Amundsen used Nansen's old ship, also custom built for Arctic conditions and veteran of several expeditions, without incident. Norwegian ship builders were maybe more aware of what was needed. As I recall, an important feature was sloped sides, so that squeezing ice would lift instead of crushing it.
Yes, this is also true. "Real men man-haul their sleds". Also they frowned at Amundsen because his project did not have a significant scientific purpose.
Fram - Nansen's ship which Amundsen half-stole/half-borrowed - was constructed by a scotsman by the way. But yes, it was purposefully built for handling the pack ice. It is on display in a museum in Oslo.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/shackletonexped/images.html
Even if you think Erebus shouldn't have been there, the efforts to keep everyone alive get a big thumps up from me.
(Also, his ponies did way better than Scott's, Scott rejected what worked for Shackleton: https://captainantarctica.com.au/meat-eating-horses-of-antar...)
Isn't this true for Nansen as well?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World
Around the same time period as Scott's crew were dying of scurvy, Japanese naval crews were dropping like flies from malnutrition for insisting on eating white rice and nothing but. And pellagra gripped the American south.
Fiennes' also wrote a good book about Amundsen and Scott, Race to the Pole.
I've heard good things about "Mawson's Will" by Lennard Bickel.
(I tend to focus on Antarctica due to its proximity and the historical connections to Antarctic exploration in my area)
But, so many explorers that were contemporaries of Shackleton, like Amundsen, Nansen, Byrd, Scott, etc. _were_ glory hounds. Does that negate their exploration? I mean, it often meant that they took stupid risks to be "first", fully agree there. But if we eliminate the glory-hound polar explorers, there's precious few left.
[0]: https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/engage/cup/catalogue/books/mr-e...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kākāpō
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY
[3]: https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/travels-with-mr-explorer-dougl...
I still have in my mind the marvelous pictures taken by Frank Hurley, the night ones are impressive.
I still have the book from Alfred Lansing, Endurance. It shows you how hard was the life after the Endurance was trapped in ice, and how they manage to survive in one of the worst climates.
Good thing the endurance will be there, protected and resting from the hard journey.
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/shackleton/on-demand/308...
Does this prevent them from entering Shackleton's cabin? With the amazing condition this ship has remained in, I wonder what interesting things they would find in there.
(You can even buy a whisky based on the whisky they found stashed at Shackleton's Hut): https://nzaht.org/shackletons-whisky/
I just didn't expect it to keep popping up in a technology focussed community. Yet I can see the appeal. The sheer determination of Shackelton and crew should be inspiring to all people.
Truly a testament to the skill of Frank Worsley, Endurance's captain, whose navigation was also essential in successfully reaching South Georgia in a modified lifeboat [1], returning themselves to civilization and calling for help to rescue the rest of Shackleton's men waiting on Elephant Island.
On the Endurance expedition, however, his treatment of Harry 'Chippy' McNish [0], who performed the modifications to the lifeboat James Caird, which was then used to travel across open sea to travel to South Georgia island, and the crew's subsequent rescue, was not a proud moment for Shackleton. In particular, his lack of recommendation regarding the Polar Medal for McNish looks particularly petty in hindsight. But I wasn't there, and I suspect that both Shackleton and McNish were better men than I.
> Every detail of her construction had been scrupulously planned to ensure maximum durability: for example, every joint and fitting was cross-braced for maximum strength.
> ...
> Though her hull looked from the outside like that of any other vessel of a comparable size, it was not. She was designed for polar conditions with a very sturdy construction. Her keel members were four pieces of solid oak, one above the other, adding up to a thickness of 85 inches (2,200 mm), while its sides were between 30 inches (760 mm) and 18 inches (460 mm) thick, with twice as many frames as normal and the frames being of double thickness. She was built of planks of oak and Norwegian fir up to 30 inches (760 mm) thick, sheathed in greenheart, an exceptionally strong and heavy wood. The bow, which would meet the ice head-on, had been given special attention. Each timber had been made from a single oak tree chosen for its shape so that its natural shape followed the curve of the ship's design. When put together, these pieces had a thickness of 52 inches (1,300 mm).
So I guess if you build a ship that way for that purpose, it probably will survive for quite a while relatively unscathed (apart from that it has been crushed a bit by the ice).
(the Titanic isn't spectacularly rusting because it's sat in water with very low oxygen contect, it's spectacularly rusting because there's a microbe feeding on it. The well preserved wooden wrecks tend to be submerged in mud or in zones with relatively little life too)
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30613319, but no comments there)
It's on YouTube and well worth a watch on a slow Sunday.