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.