Amazing Survival Stories
An Amazing Survival Story.
This week represents the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission – an inspiring tale of ingenuity and survival. Three men on a crippled space craft were able to return to safely to Earth.
But consider the expedition of Sir Ernest Shackleton of Great Britain to Antarctica. In 1915 - 1916 a crew of 28 was trapped in Antarctica ice and managed to survive for over a year and a half.
Shackleton’s Journey
In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton of Great Britain set off to become the first group to cross the continent on foot. His ship, named the Endurance, entered Antarctic waters in December of that year. He had 28 crew members on board. But by February 1915, the ship was stuck in the ice with no escape or hope of rescue. The crew lived on the boat for seven months, through the Antarctic winter, including four months without any sunshine.
As the Antarctic spring and summer approached the pack ice started to break up and move with underlying sea currents. Instead of freeing their ship, the ice crushed and sank the Endurance in October 1915. Now the crew camped out on the ice, waiting for it to break up enough so they could attempt to land on a nearby island using the ship’s lifeboats. After six months on the ice, in April 1916 enough space appeared between the ice floes and the crew launched the lifeboats into the brutal freezing wind-tossed seas. Seven days later they were able to land on the inhospitable Elephant island, just off Antarctica. It was the crew’s first landfall in almost 500 days.
Now comes the most amazing part of the trip. Elephant Island was too remote for the crew to call for rescue. Shackleton decided to sail to the whaling station on South Georgia Island to get help. This island was over 700 miles away. Shackleton and a five of the crew set off in a a small lifeboat to traverse rough southern winter seas with only primitive navigation equipment. After about two weeks Shackleton landed on South Georgia Island, but the uninhabited side. He now had to cross the uncharted mountainous island without proper mountaineering equipment. When they arrived at the whaling station, it was the middle of World War I, and it took Shackleton four months to procure a boat to return to Elephant Island and rescue the rest of the crew in August 1916.
This is a great story of leadership and survival. After the journey, one of Shackleton’s contemporaries stated, regarding Shackleton’s leadership: “… when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”
The best book to read about the journey, it reads like a thriller novel - Endurance, by Alfred Lansing:
Endurance, by Alfred Lansing (click for bookstore)
An interesting side note – it took over forty years, until the 1950’s, to achieve a successful overland trans-Antarctica expedition. That mission included Edmund Hillary, who later became the first, along with Tenzing Norgay, to ascend Mount Everest. Shackleton’s mountain trek from one side of South Georgia to the other also remained un-duplicated for over forty years!