Founders
Episode 144 Ernest Shackleton: Endurance
Founders

Episode 144: Ernest Shackleton: Endurance

Founders

Episode 144

Ernest Shackleton: Endurance

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing.

[00:00:58] - 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. 

[00:01:27] - His name was Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the twenty-seven men he had watched so ingloriously leaving the stricken ship were the members of his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. 

[00:02:02] - Few men have borne the responsibility Shackleton did at that moment. Though he certainly was aware that their situation was desperate, he could not possibly have imagined then the physical and emotional demands that ultimately would be placed upon them, the rigors they would have to endure, the sufferings to which they would be subjected

[00:02:52] - Their plight was naked and terrifying in its simplicity: If they were to get out—they had to get themselves out

[00:09:21] - Shackleton returned to England a hero of the Empire. He was lionized wherever he went, knighted by the king, and decorated by every major country in the world. 

[00:10:24] - Making his primary argument for such an expedition, he wrote: It is the last great Polar journey that can be made. I feel it is up to the British nation to accomplish this, for we have been beaten at the conquest of the North Pole and beaten at the first conquest of the South Pole. There now remains the largest and most striking of all journeys—the crossing of the Continent. 

[00:12:16] - He was an explorer in the classic mold—utterly self-reliant, romantic, and swashbuckling

[00:15:20] - But the great leaders of historical record—the Napoleons, the Alexanders—have rarely fitted any conventional mold. Perhaps it’s an injustice to evaluate them in ordinary terms. 

[00:17:00] - When you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees, and pray for Shackleton. 

[00:17:15] - The motto of his family: BY ENDURANCE WE CONQUER

[00:23:10] - Shackleton said 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 looked around arrogantly. “Now then,”  he said, “where’s that damn cat.”

[00:25:15] - 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

[00:30:19] - Of all their enemies—the cold, the ice, the sea—he feared none more than demoralization

[00:32:00] - Shackleton was not an ordinary individual. He was a man who believed completely in his own invincibility, and to whom defeat was a reflection of personal inadequacy

[00:43:15] - It was pull or perish, and ignoring their sickening thirst, they leaned on their oars with what seemed the last of their strength. 

[00:47:05] - No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail

[00:48:34] - The only thing to do was to hang on and endure

[00:49:39] - They were possessed by an angry determination to see the journey through—no matter what. 

[00:54:33] - I do not know how they did it, except they had to

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Ernest Shackleton: Endurance

Introduction

"She was being crushed, not all at once, but slowly, a little at a time. The pressure of 10 million tons of ice, which was driving in against her sides and dying as she was, she cried in agony. Her frames and planking, her immense timbers, many of them almost a foot thick, screamed as the killing pressure mounted. And when her timbers could no longer stand the strain, they broke with a sound like an artillery fire."

"Forward, where the worst of the onslaught was concentrated, the ice was inundating her. It piled higher and higher against her bowls as she repelled each new wave until gradually it mounted to her bulwarks, then crashed across the deck, overwhelming her with a crushing load that pushed her head down even deeper. 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. Later to the privacy of his diary, Macklin confided, 'I do not think I have ever had such a horrible, sickening sensation of fear as I had whilst in the hold of that breaking ship.'"

"The general feeling of relief at being off the ship was not shared by one man. His name was, Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the 27 men he had watched so ingloriously leaving their stricken ship where the members of his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The date was October 27, 1915. The name of the ship was Endurance. The position was in the icy wasteland of the Antarctic's treacherous Weddell Sea, just about midway between the South Pole and the nearest known outpost of humanity, some 1,200 miles away."

"Few men have borne the responsibility Shackleton did at that moment, though, he certainly was aware that their situation was desperate. He could not possibly have imagined then the physical and emotional demands that ultimately would be placed upon them. The rigors they would have to endure, the suffering to which they would be subjected. 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. There were no helicopters. There were 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."

That was an excerpt from the book that I hold in my hand and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage and it was written by Alfred Lansing. This book was first published in 1959. And since then, it has popularized Shackleton's name so that his name has essentially become shorthand. If you want to describe traits of a great leader, somebody that refuses to give up, you would compare somebody to be like Shackleton. Shackleton's name appears over and over again in a lot of the biographies that I read for this podcast.

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