Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage Part I, Chapter 1

My name is Nina Schalk and I am blogging about Alfred Lansing's book, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage


Quote: “As they went over the side onto the ice, most of the men felt immense relief at being away from the doomed ship, and few if any of them would have returned to her voluntarily.”


Discussion: The crew is in dire straits at the opening of the novel Endurance, as their leader Ernest Shackleton must give the order to abandon ship after a hard-fought battle against the water and the increasing pressure of the ice.  Though the crew had seen this coming for a while and the large majority breathed a sigh of relief when the order came, Shackleton saw the event in a different light.  Out of all the men aboard the ship, Shackleton seemed to be the only one to realize the hardships that lay ahead.  Not that the men were oblivious to their not-so-ideal situation, just that they all seemed to have a prevailing feeling that somehow everything would turn out alright.  Shackleton was in charge of making sure that happened, and he was also in charge of the entire expedition itself, the goal of which was to cross the Antarctic continent.  The men had no way of communicating with the outside world and were many miles from any sort of land, but knowing that he was an experience and purposeful leader, they had confidence in Shackleton.  The above quote summarizes the mood of the shipmates after getting on the ship.  A couple unlucky crew members by the names of Alexander Macklin and Frank Wild were ordered to return to the boat to retrieve firewood and concrete details were used to describe how the ship was violently pressured until the walls came in sounds came forth sounding like a tortured animal.  These sounds were an example of dissonance, as they were harsh and without pattern or rhyme.

Literary Terms: mood- The emotional atmosphere in the first chapter is primarily one of shared relief between the crew mates as they are finally given the order to abandon their sinking ship.

           Concrete details- The author clearly and specifically describes what the heavy, moving ice floes are doing to the tough ship.  He tells how the ice is pushing the boat from multiple sides and even though the walls are many feet thick, they bend in like a new sapling.

           Dissonance- The sounds given off by the sinking ship are very harsh and discordant.  They are compared to various other sounds, such as a train and a dying beast.

This is the Endurance after she was abandoned

An example of the ice floes the ship may have encountered