Endurance: Part 7 and Epilogue

The Mountains of South Georgia

             In these chapters of Alfred Lansing’s novel Endurance, Shackleton’s crew, all twenty-eight men, was rescued at last. After arriving on South Georgia, Shackleton and the six others who had made the journey in the James Caird realized that some of them would have to journey through across the island in order to reach the whaling station and bring back help. Shackleton, Frank Worsley, and Thomas Crean decide to make the trip, and after overcoming many struggles, are successful in returning with a rescue boat. Sir Ernest Shackleton promised to rescue his crew, and that is exactly what he did. That quality of Shackleton, his ability to keep his word, amazed me throughout this entire novel. Whatever he said he would accomplish he did, and he never gave up. It took four rescue attempts and four different boats to retrieve the men stranded on Elephant Island, yet every time Shackleton gathered up a crew and set off to bring his men home. After facing a shipwreck, cracking ice flows, Antarctic storms, the Weddell Sea, and Drake’s Passage, I imagine that one would just want to go home and rest for possibly a year. Shackleton refused to wait though, and as soon as he had reached the whaling station, he was leaving to rescue his crew. He truly was a remarkable man.

The Yelcho, the ship that rescued the men stranded on Elephant Island.

The literary term epiphany is used by the author, Alfred Lansing, in these chapters of Endurance. Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean had just reached the whaling station on South Georgia Island that would provide relief, and they finally begin to comprehend what had just happened.

“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, the knew now that somehow they had done much, much more than ever they set out to do,” (270).

The abandoned Stromness Whaling Station where Shackleton
found relief aid.

            In this passage from the novel Endurance, Shackleton and the two other men were safe, well-fed, and comfortable for the first time in years. They thought back to the original goal of the expedition though, and they realized that they did not even come close to accomplishing it. At this point, the men recognized, as the quote says, that they achieved so much more than they ever could have if the voyage had been successful. They created bonds with each other that could withstand an Antarctic winter, sail 800 miles in a twenty-two foot long boat, and trek across the unexplored inland of South Georgia, and they grew a greater respect for nature and the power that she really does hold.