[Alfred Lansing] (Endurance: Shackletons's Incredible Voyage) Part one: Audacity (Vocabulary word: Setting)

[Author's Note: These posts will most likely be a personal voyage. I've never maintained a blog before, so please excuse the excessively long title for this post. As for the structure of these twelve posts, I will have seven posts for the seven parts and five posts covering various themes inserted by Lansing.]

The first part of the novel consists of Lansing depicting the background material on Shackleton's third expedition from its origins in England to Shackleton's call to abandon the ship. From the beginning, Shackleton's plan of crossing Antarctica on foot was deemed audacious by his cohorts, and it proved to be extremely challenging in regard to procurement of equipment and logistics. Custom tents, ship modifications, and the sheer amount of food required were all signs of the difficulty of preparation.

According to Lansing's depiction, who was better for handing such a feat than Ernest Shackleton? On page fourteen, Lansing included a tribute to Shackleton: "... but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on you knees and pray for Shackleton." For this to be true, Shackleton must remain decisive even in the darkest of times.

It is this resolve, this audacity, and this leadership that leads into the final chapters of part one and establishes the setting. The time was October 27, 1915, when a voyage of the same magnitude was not attempted until 1957. The place was 69 degrees 5' South and 51 degrees 30' West, adrift on a floe deep inside of the treacherous Weddell sea. The environment was grim: brutally low temperatures, changing conditions on the ice, no remote human contact for around three hundred and fifty miles, and a greatly reduced supply of food all worsened the nightmare of losing a ship unexpectedly. Will this dire situation test the iron will of Ernest Shackleton?

The Endurance listing on the ice floes

If common experience tells anything of value, this will challenge Shackleton, but he and his crew will miraculously survive the great challenge of survival. A suitable, albeit humorous example of this is in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl when the HMS Interceptor battles the Black Pearl. The Interceptor is forced to fire silverware at the Pearl due to a lack of ammunition, but the Black Pearl overran the Interceptor, destroyed it, jailed its crew, and marooned Jack and Elizabeth. This situation is can be related to Shackleton's loss of the Endurance. Both captains desperately attempted to save their ships, both ships were destroyed, both crews survived the sinking of their respective ships, and both captains were put in perilous situations in the end.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - HMS Interceptor battling the Black Pearl