Incredible is right. Astonishing is also accurate. This is the best adventure story I've ever read, and possibly the best ever written: if there's a better one, tell me what it is and I'll read it immediately.
How this group of men survived through multiple Antarctic winters with the most primitive of equipment and barely any food boggles the mind. I kept expecting people to die, but they didn't. How is it possible that a group of 28 men survived for almost two years in Antarctica in 1914 after their ship was crushed by the ice?
Not only did they survive, they rescued themselves. There were no radios, no GPS, no emergency beacons, literally no way to get help unless you were within visual range of rescue. They had woolen clothes, felt boots, reindeer-hair sleeping bags to keep them warm. Some small life boats to travel in. A sextant, compass and maps for navigation and not even a plastic bag to keep those things dry.
At any one of thousands of moments Shackleton's crew could have been crushed by ice, drowned, succumbed to hypothermia, been eaten by a leopard seal, starved to death, died due to dehydration or any other manner of things, but they didn't. One guy even has a heart attack and survives. If it was fiction I'd dismiss it as ridiculous.
Lansing's account is well written and gripping. He moves through tedious sections of waiting with style - you get a feeling for the bone crushing boredom of being trapped by weather and ice conditions, but the story itself doesn't get boring.
Probably the most impressive thing about the whole journey is that no-one gave up. I honestly don't understand how that was possible. Shackleton was obviously an impressive leader to be able to maintain a functioning team through all of the trials of the journey, but even so it just seems....impossible. I'm very certain that in similar circumstances I would have ended my own misery rather than continue.
Many of them, it seemed, finally grasped for the first time just how desperate things really were. More correctly, they became aware of their own inadequacy, of how utterly powerless they were. Until the march from Ocean Camp they had nurtured in the backs of their minds the attitude Shackleton strove so unceasingly to imbue them with, a basic faith in themselves—that they could, if need be, pit their strength and their determination against any obstacle—and somehow overcome it.
Certainly the intense cold was a factor in this condition, and the two physicians believed it was aggravated by the fact that they were continually wet so that they absorbed water through their skin. Whatever the reason, it required a man to leave the slight comfort of the sheltering canvas and make his way to the lee side of the boat several times during the night. Most of the men also had diarrhea from their diet of uncooked pemmican, and they would suddenly have to rush for the side and, holding fast to a shroud, sit on the frozen gunwale. Invariably, the icy sea wet them from beneath.
Clark had gone off in the Caird, leaving Greenstreet in the Docker with nothing to protect his hands as he rowed. Now his hands began to freeze. Frostbite blisters developed in his palms, and the water in them also froze. The blisters became like hard pebbles inserted into his flesh.
Once every ninety seconds or less the Caird’s sail would go slack as one of these gigantic waves loomed astern, possibly 50 feet above her, and threatening, surely, to bury her under a hundred-million tons of water. But then, by some phenomenon of buoyancy, she was lifted higher and higher up the face of the onrushing swell until she found herself, rather unexpectedly, caught in the turmoil of foam at the summit and hurtling forward. Over and over again, a thousand times each day, this drama was re-enacted. Before long, to the men on board the Caird, it lost all elements of awesomeness and they found it routine and commonplace instead, as a group of people may become inured to the perils of living in the shadow of an active volcano.
They all hated Orde-Lees, with good reason, who, it seemed to me, was the only one acting out of self preservation. Amazingly this rag-tag team, that was thrown together with barely an interview in some cases, all pulled their weight equally through a series of disasters:
Most of all they cursed Orde-Lees, who had got hold of the only set of oilskins and refused to give them up. He maneuvered himself into the most comfortable position in the boat by shoving Marston out, and he would not move. He either ignored or was oblivious to the oaths flung at him.
My only regret of the novel is that we don't hear of the reaction when they returned home, or where the crew we came to know ended up after they got back. The scene of acknowledgement by the whalers was very moving, but left me wanting to know more about what the world thought. Perhaps it all got lost in the midst of WWI.
5 stars.
