Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
Do you think your life is hard? Imagine being trapped in Antarctica with a limited amount of food and supplies. The ship you sailed there in is broken. Oh, it’s also 1914.
Such is the story of the Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton that met with unimaginable adversity. As they neared Antarctica (with the goal of traversing it via dogsled, their ship Endurance became trapped in the frozen Weddell Sea, forcing them to spend winter on the boat waiting for the sea to thaw. Over time, though, the ice eventually crushed and destroyed the ship, forcing them to come up with a plan B. This involved a combination of walking (and schlepping all their supplies + 3 boats), floating on ice, and navigating a few tiny boats through frigid and turbulent waters (which included not sleeping for days at one point). As their rations ran out, they survived off dog food and penguin / seal meat.
Then, to finish it, a small group of them rowed for 14 days to get help on South Georgia Island, where they landed on the “wrong” side and had to climb an extremely hard terrain (which involved sliding hundreds of feet down a mountain with no idea where it would take them) while not stopping to sleep (which would’ve guaranteed freezing to death). A truly wild story. Book was written in 1959, but has aged well and is very readable.
Lessons:
Leadership can be lonely. As the leader, Shackleton didn’t really have anyone to confide in. He was obviously hesitant to express fear or doubt, in even the most hopeless situation. We talk about vulnerability, but part of leadership is being able to “keep it together” and project strength to your people.
We can find happiness (or an approximation of it) in surprising situations. Most of the crew was stranded on Elephant Island while a few went to get help. Their existence consisted of sleeping in a frigid “hut” and living off penguins and seals. With all of this, they still kept decent moods - perhaps because they were on solid land at last and had just survived a harrowing journey in tiny ships. As one of them wrote:
“It is hard to realize one’s position here…living in a smoky, dirty,. ramshackle little hut with only just sufficient room to cram us all in…a horrible existence, but yet we are pretty happy…”
You don’t need technology to do great things. This happened 100+ years ago!