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.