Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage QUOTES

1 " We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

2 " In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the Ice Age— no warmth, no life, no movement. Only those who have experienced it can fully appreciate what it means to be without the sun day after day and week after week. Few men unaccustomed to it can fight off its effects altogether, and it has driven some men mad. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

3 " During the day enough light filtered through the canvas roofing so that the men could make their way about, but long before dusk the hut grew much too dark to see anything. Marston and Hurley experimented and found that, by filling a small container with blubber oil and draping pieces of surgical bandage over the edge as a wick, they could obtain a feeble flame by which a man might read if he were not more than a few feet away. By such methods they gradually eliminated one little misery after another. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

4 " They were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world, drifting they knew not where, without a hope of rescue, subsisting only so long as Providence sent them food to eat.
And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances. On November 4, Macklin wrote in his diary: "It has been a lovely day, and it is hard to think we are in a frightfully precarious situation."
It was an observation typical of the entire party. There was not a hero among them, at least not in the fictional sense. Still not a single diary reflected anything beyond the matter-of-fact routine of each day's business. "

― Alfred Lansing, , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

5 " There once was a mouse who lived in a tavern. One night the mouse found a leaky barrel of beer, and he drank all he could hold. When the mouse had finished, he sat up, twirled his whiskers, and looked around arrogantly. “Now then,” he said, “where’s that damned cat? "

― Ernest Shackleton , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

6 " They thought of home, naturally, but there was no burning desire to be in civilization for its own sake. Worsley recorded: "Waking on a fine morning I feel a great longing for the smell of dewy wet grass and flowers of a Spring morning in New Zealand or England. One has very few other longings for civilization—good bread and butter, Munich beer, Coromandel rock oysters, apple pie and Devonshire cream are pleasant reminiscences rather than longings. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

7 " Then he opened the Bible Queen Alexandra had given them and ripped out the flyleaf and the page containing the Twenty-third Psalm. He also tore out the page from the Book of Job with this verse on it:

Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone.
And the face of the deep is frozen.

The he laid the Bible in the snow and walked away.
It was a dramatic gesture, but that was the way Shackleton wanted it. From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

8 " They were for all practical purposes alone in the frozen Antarctic seas. It had been very nearly a year since they had last been in contact with civilization. Nobody in the outside world knew they were in trouble, much less where they were. They had no radio transmitter with which to notify any would-be rescuers, and it is doubtful that any rescuers could have reached them even if they had been able to broadcast an SOS. It was 1915, and there were no helicopters, no Weasels, no Sno-Cats, no suitable planes.

Thus their plight was naked and terrifying in its simplicity. If they were to get out—they had to get themselves out. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

9 " A forbidding-looking place, certainly, but that only made it seem the more pitiful. It was the refuge of twenty-two men who, at that very moment, were camped on a precarious, storm-washed spit of beach, as helpless and isolated from the outside world as if they were on another planet. Their plight was known only to the six men in this ridiculously little boat, whose responsibility now was to prove that all the laws of chance were wrong—and return with help. It was a staggering trust. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

10 " The simple act of sailing had carried him beyond the world of reversals, frustrations, and inanities. And in the space of a few short hours, life had been reduced from a highly complex existence, with a thousand petty problems, to one of the barest simplicity in which only one real task remained—the achievement of the goal. "

― Alfred Lansing, , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

11 " There were the sounds of the pack in movement—the basic noises, the grunting and whining of the floes, along with an occasional thud as a heavy block collapsed. But in addition, the pack under compression seemed to have an almost limitless repertoire of sounds, many of which seemed strangely unrelated to the noise of ice undergoing pressure. Sometimes there was a sound like a gigantic train with squeaky axles being shunted roughly about with a great deal of bumping and clattering. At the same time a huge ship’s whistle blew, mingling with the crowing of roosters, the roar of a distant surf, the soft throb of an engine far away, and the moaning cries of an old woman. In the rare periods of calm, when the movement of the pack subsided for a moment, the muffled rolling of drums drifted across the air. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

12 " The ship reacted to each fresh wave of pressure in a different way. Sometimes she simply quivered briefly as a human being might wince if seized by a single, stabbing pain. Other times she retched in a series of convulsive jerks accompanied by anguished outcries. On these occasions her three masts whipped violently back and forth as the rigging tightened like harpstrings. But most agonizing for the men were the times when she seemed a huge creature suffocating and gasping for breath, her sides heaving against the strangling pressure.

More than any other single impression in those final hours, all the men were struck, almost to the point of horror, by the way the ship behaved like a giant beast in its death agonies. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

13 " Nor did the Antarctic represent to Shackleton merely the grubby means to a financial end. In a very real sense he needed it—something so enormous, so demanding, that it provided a touchstone for his monstrous ego and implacable drive. In ordinary situations, Shackleton's tremendous capacity for boldness and daring found almost nothing worthy of its pulling power; he was a Percheron draft horse harnessed to a child's wagon cart. But in the Antarctic—here was a burden which challenged every atom of his strength.

Thus, while Shackleton was undeniably out of place, even inept, in a great many everyday situations, he had a talent—a genius, even—that he shared with only a handful of men throughout history—genuine leadership. He was, as one of his men put it, "the greatest leader that ever came on God's earth, bar none. "

― Alfred Lansing, , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

14 " No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

15 " In that instant they felt an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment. Though they had failed dismally even to come close to the expedition's original objective, they knew now that somehow they had done much, much more than ever they set out to do. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

16 " Of all their enemies -- the cold, the ice, the sea -- he feared none more than demoralization. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

17 " Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of
physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

18 " Fortitudine vincimus—“By endurance we conquer. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

19 " In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

20 " He promised to write a book later about the trip. He sold the rights to the motion pictures and still photographs that would be taken, and he agreed to give a long lecture series on his return. In all these arrangments, there was one basic assumption - that Shackleton would survive. "

― , Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage