The story is well known enough - Shackleton's 1914 Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition set out from England in the Endurance upon the outbreak of war, having offered the ship and crew into naval service, and been asked by Churchill to continue on their expedition.

His narration put you right on the deck of the Endurance that journeyed weeks through miles of pack ice until the ship was locked in by ice in the Wendell Sea. Ernest Shackleton and 27 of his crew against all odds endure the hardship of Antarctica after The Endurance was stuck in ice. Accompanying Lansing’s text are the evocative and very striking photograph’s taken by the expedition’s photographer Frank Hurley – which amazingly enough survived the ordeal of the expedition.In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Stuck in "the icy wasteland of the Antarctic's treacherous Weddell Sea, just about midway between the South Pole and the nearest known outpost of humanity, some 1,200 miles away," the ship Endurance is abandoned a little more than a year after setting out from London in 1914. Ernest Shackleton has long since wanted to be the first in some South Pole related expedition, but somehow other people kept accomplishing things before he even managed to get out of the harbor. What amazing courage and stamina these men had, they must have had nerves and bodies of steel and withstand so much. The author’s retelling begins slowly as he sets the scene, and his writing is straight-forward and unembellished—and all the more powerful for its lack of adornment.

I’m not sure which fact was more astounding to me but they are both truly worthy of an eye-bulging jaw-drop. In the end this is one of the most harrowing stories of survival I've ever read it's just incredible, crazy good. I dreamt that I was stranded on an iceberg, and was relieved to wake up in a bed, in a house, on land, in a warm climate and with food readily available.The whole epic voyage takes over a year, and every single day, they were one wave, misstep, or blizzard away from being wiped out in an instant.

This 2000 documentary narrated by Liam Neeson is not based on Alfred Lansing's book, but on a similarly-named one: The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, by Caroline Alexander. I wanted to learn a little about this expedition after seeing a play in which Ernest Shackleton was a character. Not only was he a far better explorer than Scott, both in terms of his technical and man management capabilities, but the story of the Transantarctic expedition read like an epic out of a Boys Own annual.

The wreck of HMS Endurance had been found TODAY by Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and History Hit, four miles from where captain Frank Worsley said it sank. Though he certainly was aware that their situation was desperate, he could not possibly have imagined then the physical and emotional demands that ultimately would be placed upon them, the rigors they would have to endure, the sufferings to which they would be subjected. I am sure I would have been worthless and depressed just watching the ship, the Endurance, fall into the sea, crushed by ice pressure.

An American journalist who wrote for Collier's, among other magazines and was later an editor for Time, Inc. Lansing describes how the men survived a 1,000-mile voyage in an open boat across the stormiest ocean on the globe and an overland trek through forbidding glaciers and mountains. I cried as I read the last page, not so much because of the ending, but just because I was finished with the book. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The entire complement of 28 men safely reached Elephant Island, just off the tip of the Palmer peninsula, after one week.Although he had no special skills in seamanship or mountaineering, what he did have was a gift for leadership.