#144 Ernest Shackleton

What I learned from reading Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. ---- [0:58] 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.  [1:27]  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.  [2:02] 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.  [2:52] Their plight was naked and terrifying in its simplicity: If they were to get out—they had to get themselves out.  [9:21] 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.  [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.  [12:16] He was an explorer in the classic mold—utterly self-reliant, romantic, and swashbuckling.  [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.  [17:00] When you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees, and pray for Shackleton.  [17:15] The motto of his family: BY ENDURANCE WE CONQUER.  [23:10] Shackleton said there once was a mouse who lived in a tavern. One night the mouse f