Quotes About Expedition

Before he left, Shackleton ordered the three youngest puppies killed

Our distance from Paulet I. is now 94 miles

My opinion is that the chances of getting to Paulet Is. now are about 1 in 10. . . .

It now lay exactly 91 miles away. But it was off to the WNW

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.

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

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

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

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

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

In that instant they felt an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment. Though they had failed dismally even to come close to the expedition's original objective, they knew now that somehow they had done much, much more than ever they set out to do.

The weather became so intensely cold that we sent for all the hunters who had remained out with captain Clarke's party, and they returned in the evening several of them frostbitten.

As a rule, anything that is pretty you avoid when on an expedition in the polar extremes. Normally anything other than white means a hazard such as a crevasse.

In 1986—the year before Peter Cardinal died—Gene Johnson had done an experiment that showed that Marburg and Ebola can indeed travel through the air. He infected monkeys with Marburg and Ebola by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and he discovered that a very small dose of airborne Marburg or Ebola could start an explosive infection in a monkey. Therefore, Johnson wanted the members of the expedition to wear breathing apparatus inside the cave.

Without Gay, without her ability to do a Drunkard's Walk, we could have searched that planet for a lifetime, and never found either colony.

Was Cook's ship a scientific expedition protected by a military force or a military expedition with a few scientists tagging along? That's like asking whether your petrol tank is half empty or half full. It was both. The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable. People such as Captain James Cook and the botanist Joseph Banks could hardly distinguish science from empire.

The first non-European power that tried to send a military expedition to America was Japan. That happened in June 1942, when a Japanese expedition conquered Kiska and Attu, two small islands off the Alaskan coast, capturing in the process ten US soldiers and a dog. The Japanese never got any closer to the mainland.

We knew that members of the second expedition to Area X had committed suicide by gunshot and members of the third had shot each other.

I am convinced now that I and the rest of the expedition were given access to these records for the simple reason that, for certain kinds of classified information, it did not matter what we knew or didn't know. There was only one logical conclusion: Experience told our superiors that few if any of us would be coming back.

I had a vision of that last small expedition, the last group, setting out. Maybe it was just a dozen, maybe less. Tried to imagine it as Silvina had. Trying their best to overcome those obstacles. Each one of those individuals on an epic journey. One they never came back from. But the joy. Even then, there must have been moments of joy and of contentment on the journey. Sanctuaries and times of plenty. It wasn't just a winnowing. It was a life.

Ghost bird, do you love me?" he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. "Ghost bird, do you need me?" I loved him, but I did not need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

As French author and fearless truth-seeker, André Gide, so aptly put it, "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.