Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Lansing has done a fantastic job of his painstaking research to bring this book to life. The level of detail, and personal detail he has been able to include is testament to his poring over the diaries of the men, extracting the detail and pulling it into a coherent context.

The story is well known enough - Shackleton's 1914 Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition set out from England in the Endurance upon the outbreak of war, having offered the ship and crew into naval service, and been asked by Churchill to continue on their expedition.
After leaving the South Georgia Islands, Endurance entered the pack ice and for two weeks made its way through the ice. battling away with the engine to try and reach an open passage, became fast in the ice-floe.
On 18 January, the ship became bound up in the ice, and here the men lived within the bounds of the ship, as the ice continually tested the strength of the hull. Endurance withstood the pressure of the ice for many month, until Eventually the ice won over and started to tear away the sternpost and allow water to enter the hull. Pumping was barely able to keep pace, and with the next surge in pressure beams broke and decks buckled, and the rudder as torn free. The ship was abandoned.
On November 21, 1915, 25 days after leaving the ship to camp up on the ice, Endurance was briefly raised by the ice sheets, and then sunk below the surface. Within 10 minutes the ice had closed over the opening...

This was, however, only the start of Shackleton's story - along with the other 27 men.

For a relatively short book, the story is epic.
I can't recommend this enough for anyone remotely interested in the power of human spirit, endurance, optimism and determination. An Antarctic survival story which would never have been accepted if it were written as fiction.

5 stars.