Good read for leadership tidbits during pretty adverse conditions... but the journal format makes it a tedious read.

Coming into this book, I'd decided I wanted to read a "happier" tale of polar expeditions - no human died on the Endurance side of this trip. At the end of this book, I learned once again that it was blind luck that nobody died.

Shackleton was unbelievably lucky that the Endurance sank as slowly as it did, considering all the trips back that the crew was able to make to get flour and other necessities. I don't know whether they should have tried harder to sledge across the ice floes - after George Washington De Long's inhuman attempt to get off the ice pack near the North Pole, Shackleton's attempts seem pretty wimpy.

This also included so much animal death, retold in some really eerily creepy ways. The explorers all loved the penguins, but loved dissecting their stomachs and eating them more (it is a starvation scenario so the unashamed eating is definitely understandable, but the gleeful way Shackleton described catching the penguins was pretty haunting).

I dunno. Seeing how hard it was for them to get off the continent, and then how hard it was to get ships to Elephant Island to rescue the rest, I can understand why nobody was in a hurry to throw money at the endeavor. It put a lot of things into perspective.

[SPOILER ALERT:]

If I hadn't known ahead of time that not a single person was lost on this excursion, I would have been able to finish the book. It's a great story to recount to someone in a 10 minute conversation, and it absolutely is amazing that every man (and not a single dog) survived, but it makes for a less than compelling read. It's snowing... there's ice... the ice starts to melt... the ice freezes again... it's snowing again... ice melts a little... then freezes again... they camp on this ice floe, then that one, now on land (on ice), now again on an ice floe...

I'm very sorry Sir Ernest Shackleton, I am in awe that you managed to pull through and make tough decisions, but I can't finish your book.

I read this book with considerable contempt for the risks that the Expedition undertook and its costs in human and canine lives. The final section however that records the results of the Expedition and the war records of the returning explorers has changed my mind though. These adventurers showed tremendous courage and resilience which they carried forward to later roles as well.

Polar exploration never interested me when I was younger. I had a settler’s heart, probably from playing too much Age of Empires. By all means tell me about the Vikings in Vinland, or the Maori in New Zealand, or the discovery of tropical islands… but why would anybody want to explore a frozen wasteland? What joy could there be in cresting a ridge only to see more inhospitable ice, rather than a green and pleasant land?

In the same way that – as an adult with an appreciation of my own mortality and fragility – I’ve become more interested in nuclear war fiction, which as a teenager I spurned in favour of “cosy catastrophe” apocalypses, the age of polar exploration is more interesting to me now. This is partly due to the excellent TV series The Terror, which is a retelling of Franklin’s lost expedition with a supernatural twist, and is one of the best TV series of the past decade which I urge everybody to watch. But exploration is perhaps the wrong word; it’s the survival aspect I find compelling, the attempt to salvage lives from a catastrophe. I was vaguely aware of aspects of Shackleton’s expedition, but this was the first time I properly read about it, and it’s a genuinely impressive feat of heroism.

The official name of the expedition was the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, launched in 1914 with the aim of being the first party to cross Antarctica from one coast to another. (Amundsen had reached the South Pole and then retraced his steps in 1911, pipping the doomed Scott to the post by just five weeks). To do so, the vessel Endurance would depart the Falklands and land on the coast of the Weddell Sea, while the vessel Aurora would depart New Zealand and make base near McMurdo Sound, sending parties inland to lay supply depots for the overland party from the Endurance that would be approaching from the South Pole. Both sides of the expedition met with disaster, but the inspiring part of the story is how they managed to survive – and in Shackleton’s case, leading the crew of the Endurance, how he managed to get the entire party home safe without a single loss of life.

Shackleton’s side of the story is the more famous and compelling one. In sight of the Antarctic mainland, the Endurance become stuck in unusually thick sea ice in the southern winter of 1915, and drifted with the pack for eight months before finally being crushed, leaving Shackleton and two dozen men camped out on the ice. As the pack began to break apart in the autumn of 1916, they took to their three remaining lifeboats from the Endurance and sailed for the South Shetlands, the closest ice-free land. Here they landed at Elephant Island, stuck on a miserable surf-pounded beach below towering cliffs, with no likely prospect of rescue nor long-term survival, and the southern winter setting in.

Next is the most impressive part of their entire ordeal, in which Shackleton and four others took one of the lifeboats and set out to fetch help from the only place they could feasibly reach given the prevailing winds: not the few hundred miles to the Falklands, but the 800 miles (about the distance from London to Rome) to South Georgia, where a handful of lonely outposts constituted the end of the civilised world for teams of whalers, but the beginning of it for Shackleton and company. This journey in a 22-foot boat across some of the roughest oceans in the world, at the beginning of winter, with only ten hours of light per day, is now considered one of the greatest small boat journeys in human history, alongside Bligh’s post-mutiny navigation to Timor. I think the bit that I find so personally compelling is that, due to a quirk of wind, geography and weather conditions, they were forced to land on the uninhabited western side of the island; which meant that after everything they’d been through – across all that vast ocean – they were still 20-odd miles away from help on the island’s east coast, as the crow flies. That was 20 miles of treacherous mountains, glaciers, lakes and rivers on a remote island which nobody had ever bothered to explore the interior of before. There’s something fascinating about all that vast, ancient amount of land with no human presence in it across history until Shackleton and his band of weary, bearded, exhausted survivors came slowly clambering through it – knowing that if they made a mistake, if they fell into a crevasse or fell asleep in bad conditions (as nearly happened at one point) it would spell not only their own deaths, but probably the deaths of the two dozen men left behind to shelter through the winter on Elephant Island.

The tale of the survivors of the Endurance is a fundamentally compelling story, and this is normally the part where I’d gripe about it not being told in a compelling way. But Shackleton is a surprisingly talented writer, with turns of phrase and moments of candour even behind all the stiff-upper-lip tosh you’d expect from a man of his generation, and he has an eye for the most illustrative passages that he lifts from the diaries of his men. This is one of them describing the moment the Endurance finally slipped beneath the ice after being crushed for weeks:

“November 21, 1915.—This evening, as we were lying in our tents we heard the Boss call out, ‘She’s going, boys!’ We were out in a second and up on the look-out station and other points of vantage, and, sure enough, there was our poor ship a mile and a half away struggling in her death-agony. She went down bows first, her stern raised in the air. She then gave one quick dive and the ice closed over her for ever. It gave one a sickening sensation to see it, for, mastless and useless as she was, she seemed to be a link with the outer world. Without her our destitution seems more emphasised, our desolation more complete. The loss of the ship sent a slight wave of depression over the camp. No one said much, but we cannot be blamed for feeling it in a sentimental way. It seemed as if the moment of severance from many cherished associations, many happy moments, even stirring incidents, had come as she silently up-ended to find a last resting-place beneath the ice on which we now stand. When one knows every little nook and corner of one’s ship as we did, and has helped her time and again in the fight that she made so well, the actual parting was not without its pathos, quite apart from one’s own desolation, and I doubt if there was one amongst us who did not feel some personal emotion when Sir Ernest, standing on the top of the look-out, said somewhat sadly and quietly, “She’s gone, boys.”

This reminded me of the movie Titanic: the moment when the ship goes down and then there are just the lifeboats floating in the middle of a vast ocean. A huge vessel, even crippled and dying, is the focal point of the landscape; and its sudden absence changes the landscape both physically and psychologically.

This was another patch of writing I quite liked, as the three lifeboats arrive at Elephant Island, and the men set foot on dry land for the first time in more than a year:

A curious spectacle met my eyes when I landed the second time. Some of the men were reeling about the beach as if they had found an unlimited supply of alcoholic liquor on the desolate shore. They were laughing uproariously, picking up stones and letting handfuls of pebbles trickle between their fingers like misers gloating over hoarded gold. The smiles and laughter, which caused cracked lips to bleed afresh, and the gleeful exclamations at the sight of two live seals on the beach made me think for a moment of that glittering hour of childhood when the door is open at last and the Christmas-tree in all its wonder bursts upon the vision.

That pebbly beach, after months spent camped on treacherous pack ice, is a sanctuary to them:

The fairy princess who would not rest on her seven downy mattresses because a pea lay underneath the pile might not have understood the pleasure we all derived from the irregularities of the stones, which could not possibly break beneath us or drift away; the very searching lumps were sweet reminders of our safety.

So for something that’s a hundred years old it’s well-written and engaging. A major issue with South, however, is its structure. Shackleton recounts his own personal voyage on the Weddell Sea side, culminating in his rescue of the stranded bulk of the party on Elephant Island – but then rewinds the clock and begins telling the story, from the beginning, of the Aurora’s half of the expedition on the other side of Antarctica. Now, full credit to the lads who found themselves stranded on the mainland when the Aurora was forced away: they had an even rougher time of it, including three deaths. But from a storytelling perspective, it lacks the three-act perfection of Shackleton’s story, not to mention the benefit of his personal viewpoint. He’s reduced to recounting their ordeal second-hand, and at times it feels like reading a dispassionate ship’s log. I can understand why Shackleton felt their story needed to be told, but it surely would have been better served by chapters woven among the rest of the narrative to form a chronological whole, rather than the incongruous winding-back of the clock we get instead; one which then winds itself back a second time, to wrap up the final forty pages with the aimless and uninteresting drift of the Aurora. I’ll concede that maybe inserting chapters from the Aurora and her stranded depot-laying party might have ruined the tone of isolation and loneliness experienced by Shackleton’s crew; but if that’s the case, cut them entirely. Their story still would have been told somewhere else. South, as a book, suffers from including them. Nonetheless, it’s still an engaging first-hand account of one of history’s greatest survival stories.

This book is definitely a lot of the same… There’s a lot of ice,cold and hungry people, dogs and plenty of whales and then it gets colder and so on but it’s still great because Shackleton is prettt awesome!

For lovers of polar literature, 'South' lacks the poetry and intensity of Apsley Cherry-Gerrard's 'Worst Journey in the World'. But it's matter-of-fact tone makes it highly readable and doesn't deflect from the tension (even knowing what happens). At times I had to put it aside as it was a bit too stressful. It's an amazing story with a sad coda as three of the men guided to safety by Shackleton were killed in The First World War.

An amazing, incredible story that just happens to be true. Ernst Shackleton leads an expedition to Antarctica where things just began to go wrong. Without giving too much away, even though this is recorded history, there were so many parts of this ill-fated adventure that will keep you on the edge of your sofa! Imagine men stranded in the Antarctic while WWI is raging. They have to split up. Those staying have to eat penguins for the better part of a year (not good for regularity). Shackleton and others take leaky boats, nothing to cove rthemselves with but rotting deer skins while laying on a bunch of rocks for ballast in an open boat. They needed to navigate over 800 miles of open ocean aiming for a tiny spit of land in friendly territory. The area between Antarctica and the nearest land of Africa or South America is vast. Waves start, and never end. Imagine icy waves that have built up to over 50 feet high trying to kill you and those under your command! The resolve and resourcefulness of these men, and their faith in Shackleton saved every man's life in this epic saga. Let's stop worrying about the concerning but incredibly overblown/exaggerated/exploited plague we are supposedly under and read about some real survivors and real heroes.