Quotes About Exploration

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

Mrs. Chippy some distance from camp and shot them without a qualm

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

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

Land in sight! Land in sight!

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.

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.

In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.

He promised to write a book later about the trip. He sold the rights to the motion pictures and still photographs that would be taken, and he agreed to give a long lecture series on his return. In all these arrangments, there was one basic assumption - that Shackleton would survive.

For scientific leadership give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

They thought of home, naturally, but there was no burning desire to be in civilization for its own sake. Worsley recorded: "Waking on a fine morning I feel a great longing for the smell of dewy wet grass and flowers of a Spring morning in New Zealand or England. One has very few other longings for civilization—good bread and butter, Munich beer, Coromandel rock oysters, apple pie and Devonshire cream are pleasant reminiscences rather than longings.

The whole undertaking was criticized in some circles as being too "audacious." And perhaps it was. But if it hadn't been audacious, it wouldn't have been to Shackleton's liking. He was, above all, an explorer in the classic mold—utterly self-reliant, romantic, and just a little swashbuckling.

This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe—and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone. The

So many worlds, so much to do,So little done, such things to be.

Much have I seen and known; cities of menAnd manners, climates, councils, governments,Myself not least, but honor'd of them all;And drunk delight of battle with my peers,Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.I am a part of all that I have met;Yet all experience is an arch wherethroughGleams that untravel'd world.