Isolated Expedition

Imagine a Trip to the Antarctic in 1914. There’s not any GPS, no world-reaching radio, without a satellite telephone. Brutal states, rationed food, tight quarters. Sounds pretty bleak. Now imagine something goes horribly wrong. As days turn into weeks that the rationed food is used up. As weeks turn into months hope is all that is left. When hope diminishes, all that is left is that the will to survive.
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 voyage become a disaster just before he and his team of twenty-eight could hit Antarctica. Their ship The Endurance was kept by ice for ten weeks and then crushed by it is suspended, unforgiving drive, and that is just the start of the two-years long journey. It’s astonishing what he and his team live over this time frame simply to survive.

That is an excerpt from a diary kept by crewman Thomas Orde-Lees that recounts an extremely chilly and desperate time some six months following the men left the crumpled, mangled wreckage of their ship over three lifeboats.

“Since the water flowed into the ships it froze instantly forming thick incrustations of ice on the inside of the boat and above all the equipment freezing up the sail as rigid as a piece of corrugated iron. Fortunately the water that ran into the base of the boat didn’t freeze so that by regular bailing we could keep pace with it and stop the accumulation of ice along the keels, in which, had it formed, it would have been next to impossible to eradicate it on account of the freight.

Much sleet covered , and what with this and the sea spray we were all more or less moist through and our outer garments was frozen stiff. Our time was largely occupied in picking off the ice one another’s backs. It’d be a lie to state we were happy under these conditions but again and again we made a feeble effort to assume a cheerful, optimistic air in spite of ourselves. We were being sorely tried, indeed, though.”