Alfred Lansing · 1959 · survival

Alfred Lansing's 1959 account of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, written from the survivors' diaries and interviews with the men still living. The ship never reached the continent. What follows is twenty months on ice, in open boats and on foot, and every one of the twenty-eight men came home.

1. 1
   Buenos Aires

   The Endurance leaves for the south in October 1914 with a crew partly recruited on the quayside, war already declared, and Shackleton's offer to hand the ship to the Admiralty refused in one word: proceed.

2. 2
   South Georgia

   A month at the whaling station at Grytviken, where the Norwegians tell him the ice is the worst they have seen in years and he sails into it anyway - the last land any of them will stand on for sixteen months.

3. 3
   Ocean Camp

   Beset a day's sail from the continent and frozen in for ten months, drifting north with the pack. When the ship is finally crushed they camp on the floe beside her and watch the stern go under in November 1915.

4. 4
   Patience Camp

   Five months on a shrinking floe, eating seal and then the dogs, with nothing to do but wait for the ice to break and hope it breaks in the right place - which is the section of the book that most tests the reader.

5. 5
   Elephant Island

   Seven days in three open boats to a bare rock nobody visits, and the first solid ground since 1914 - and it is obvious at once that no one will ever look for them here, so somebody has to go and fetch help.

6. 6
   King Haakon Bay

   Eight hundred miles of the Southern Ocean in a twenty-two foot boat, navigated by four sextant sights in seventeen days - and they make a landfall on the wrong side of South Georgia in a hurricane.

7. 7
   Stromness

   Three of them cross the uncharted interior in thirty-six hours with fifty feet of rope and a carpenter's adze - and walk into the whaling station looking like something the manager cannot place, and ask what year it is.