Today we are talking about Ernest Shackleton and his quest to become the first man to cross the Antarctic. It all goes horribly wrong and he never even makes it to Antarctica. But what happens is perhaps the most epic survival tale of all time, revealing the real heart of Endurance.
Not the ship. The ship is gone. She was crushed in the ice and swallowed up by the Weddell Sea.
The ship Endurance never made it. But the word did. Because the word came first.
Fortitudine Vincimus. By endurance we conquer. That was Shackleton's family motto, carried by the family long before there was ever a ship to put it on the side of. When he bought a vessel for his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he renamed her for it. And then the ice took the ship, but not the motto. The motto was already rooted in the hearts of the men.
In Part 1:
We start with a boy born in County Kildare who was poor at best in school, finishing near the bottom of his class, but who was a greedy reader, and who was simply not interested in any sort of normal work. We follow him onto Scott's Discovery expedition, where he gets within 500 miles of the South Pole and is hauled back to the ship on a sledge, coughing blood. That humiliation becomes the fuel for everything after.
Then the plan. Two ships, two teams, opposite sides of the continent. Eighteen hundred miles across ground no human being had ever seen, carrying only half the food they needed, betting their lives that men they would never meet had left the rest of it waiting for them.
We look at the ship herself, and she really is a beast. A keel of four solid oak pieces stacked seven feet one inch thick. A bow where every timber was cut from a single oak tree, chosen so its natural growth followed the curve of the design, four feet four inches of solid wood. The strongest wooden ship ever built in Norway. Armored end to end against the wrong threat.
We meet the crew, more than 5,000 people applied, including three women and Shackleton's interview process, which was quite odd but effective. Five minutes. Sometimes less. He wasn't hiring from the resume. He was trying to get under it.
Then they sail into the Weddell Sea in the worst ice year anyone could remember, after every man on South Georgia told him to wait until next season.
And on January 24th, 1915, with open water close enough to hit with a stone, all sails up and the engine at full steam, she leaned against the ice with all her might and never moved a foot.
Never moved a foot.
Source material: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing, 1959. It's a fantastic book. I highly suggest you pick up a copy if you can.
Part 2 coming soon — the ice takes the ship, and we follow Shackleton as he battles to save every man.
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Please Check out Explorers Podcast if you would like to learn more about Ernest Shackleton
Ernest Shackleton – Explorers Podcast
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