April 7, 2022
I finished Alfred Lansing's 1959 account of the ill-fated 1914 trans-Antarctic expedition of British explorer/adventurer Ernest Shackleton a little over a week ago. As an adventure yarn, this book is a very compelling read. As history,
it almost defies belief. I'd owned the book for years, but the day it
was reported that the Endurance had been found 3,000 meters down at the
bottom of the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica, I picked it up
and started reading. Lansing's account, written over 60 years ago and 40
years after the events described, is based on interviews with surviving
members of the expedition as well as the journals and diaries of
several other members. Lansing's style is terse and journalistic -- he
was an American newspaperman and freelance writer -- with a sense of
drama, notably in the many cliffhanger conclusions of chapters. These
qualities coupled with the incredible nature of the events described
propel the narrative along such that, by the book's final section, I had
trouble putting it down at night: even knowing how things came out in
the end, I couldn't imagine how the men involved managed to bring that
conclusion about! Having grown up sailing the Maine coast during the
summers gave me a slight sense of what they went through, but even
landlubbers, I think, especially those interested in history, adventure,
and/or the limits of human endurance, should find Lansing's book
gripping.