Quotes from Alfred Lansing

Unless there was a radical change in the northerly movement of the pack

By 5 P.M., after three hours on the trail, they were 1 mile from the ship

it seemed that they would simply pass Paulet Island by.

Then, on March 9, they felt the swell—the undeniable, unmistakable rise and fall of the ocean.

But Worsley took his chronometer out to the edge of the floe and timed the interval between swells—eighteen seconds

Shackleton immediately ran back to camp, going from tent to tent shouting

And though the pack in every direction appeared to stretch in endless desolation

Land in sight! Land in sight!

it abounded with life.

It lay exactly 42 miles away; only 20 miles beyond it lay what had been their destination, Paulet Island.

They had had no sleep for almost eighty hours, and their bodies had been drained by exposure

Finner, humpback, and huge blue whales, some of them a hundred feet long

Worsley identified the tallest of the peaks as Mount Percy on Joinville Island off the very tip of the Palmer Peninsula.

He had proved himself on land. He had demonstrated there beyond all doubt his ability to pit his matchless tenacity against the elements—and win. But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

several men had strongly urged Shackleton to risk this one desperate dash back to Ocean Camp

now barely visible about 7 miles away.

By the end of July, 1914, however, everything had been collected, tested, and stowed aboard the Endurance.

Another night, this time without a drop of water, and possibly another gale—they simply did not have it in them.

And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances.

Hurriedly they ran up every sail to its full height and headed for the narrow opening in the reefs.

She sailed from London's East India Docks on August 1.

Wild, with six men, was sent back to the ship to salvage anything of value.

Then they came about once more onto the starboard tack. This time she just managed to slip through.

No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.