57 pages • 1 hour read
Alfred LansingA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The central conflict in Endurance pits the ship’s crew against the natural world, with the extreme and at times alien environment of Antarctica amplifying the dangers that nature always poses to humanity. However, Lansing also draws attention to the beauty of the Antarctic wilderness, which is often inseparable from its harshness.
Wind, water, and a landscape mostly devoid of life all threatened the crew’s survival at various times, yet the men repeatedly found themselves as much drawn to their surroundings as repelled by them. Lansing’s description of Elephant Island is a good example: “When the sun did shine, the island became a place of rugged beauty, with the sunlight shimmering off the glaciers, producing indescribably vivid colors that were constantly changing” (259). Despite the overall danger of the environment, Lansing implies, sights such as this actually contributed to the crew’s survival by boosting morale.
Other aspects of the men’s surroundings were merely threatening. In Lansing’s account, one of the most alien elements of the Antarctic environment is the phenomenon of polar night, which merely exacerbated the sense of isolation and desolation in the Weddell Sea among the stranded crew. Previous expeditions had experienced low moods during the sunless Antarctic winter, and their depression, despair, loss of concentration, and melancholy serve as reminders that this is not an environment most humans are naturally adapted to. While the book describes the magnificence of the moon illuminating the ice floes in great detail, this is juxtaposed with an environment devoid of all human contact except other crewmembers. All the crew could do in this environment was retreat from it: The thick sides of the ship provided security and insulation from an environment that often seemed surreal.
That sense of security was ultimately shattered by the element of the Antarctic landscape that Lansing devotes the most attention to: the ice itself, which first trapped and then crushed the Endurance, necessitating the crew’s journey toward rescue. The crew described the destruction of the Endurance in zoomorphic similes, likening it to “a giant beast in its death agonies” (7). Likewise, they compared the sounds of the ice to ship’s whistles and crowing roosters. While the men were embroiled in a struggle with nature at its harshest, they thus hearkened back to the sights and sounds of their everyday lives in an effort to find some point of reference for their experiences. Ultimately, however, this juxtaposition of humdrum background noises with towering icebergs that reached 1,000 feet underwater merely underscores the power of the latter.
The work’s title is an homage not only to the ship but also to the spirit of its crew, who survived setback after setback in some of the harshest environmental conditions on the planet. That all of them lived to be rescued is for Lansing a testament to the will to survive, although he also complicates his portrait of heroism by noting the downfalls of certain survival strategies.
To some extent, Lansing suggests, the crew’s perseverance can be chalked up to psychological denial. Many crewmembers exhibited a cocky sense of invulnerability after the ship survived repeated battering by broken ice floes, believing that “the Endurance was equal to any pressure” (62). As the leader of the expedition, Shackleton was troubled by this attitude: He needed a crew calm in the face of crisis but physically and psychologically capable of evacuating the ship on a moment’s notice, if necessary. Nevertheless, Shackleton recognized the role of optimism—even unfounded optimism—in maximizing one’s chances of survival. For example, it was partly to communicate an attitude of confidence that he refused to backtrack to retrieve three seal carcasses during their journey across the ice floes. Though the men needed the food desperately, returning would have been a tacit admission of how bad the situation truly was.
Lansing also draws attention to the psychological toll of having to fight each moment to survive. In some ways, having a task to focus on benefited the men by preventing them from worrying constantly and futilely. Here, for example, is how Lansing describes the Caird’s struggles with vast waves during the final voyage to South Georgia:
[The dangerous rising and falling of the boat] lost all elements of awesomeness and [the men] found it routine and commonplace instead, as a group of people may become inured to living in the shadow of an active volcano.
[…]
[L]ife was reckoned in periods of a few hours, or possibly only a few minutes—an endless succession of trials leading to deliverance from the particular hell of the moment (286).
Though advantageous in the moment, over time, this coping mechanism had a deadening effect—as evidenced by the men’s wonder and relief whenever they had a chance to pause and take in their surroundings.
For the most part, however, Lansing suggests that the crew resisted the dehumanizing effects of their circumstances. Despite the petty squabbles that broke out among the men, they showed a genuine spirit of charity toward one another on numerous occasions. For instance, the normally curmudgeonly storekeeper, Orde-Lees, at one point massaged First Officer Greenstreet’s frostbitten feet in order to aid circulation, ultimately restoring sensation by warming the man’s feet inside his shirt on the skin of his chest. Exposed to excruciating physical challenges, many of the crewmembers appeared to become more self-sacrificing, and this too played a crucial role in their survival.