Endurance in Troubles
Soldiers of Grace are empowered with endurance.
Soldiers of grace are empowered with endurance
In 1908, Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton headed an Antarctic expedition attempting to reach the South Pole. They came closer than any before but, 97 miles short of the pole, had to turn back. Shackleton and his men trudged over 200 miles of ice floes, dragging a lifeboat weighing nearly a ton, taken from their ship, crushed by the ice pack.
In his diary Shackleton told of the time when their food supplies were exhausted save for one last ration of hardtack, a dried sort of biscuit, that was distributed to each man. Some of the men took snow, melted it, and made tea while consuming their biscuit. Others, however, stowed the hardtack in their food sacks, saving it for a last moment of hungry desperation.
The fire was built up, and weary, exhausted men climbed into their sleeping bags to face a restless sleep, tossing and turning. Shackleton said that he was almost asleep when out of the corner of his eye, he noticed one of his most trusted men sitting up in his bag and looking about to see if anyone was watching.
Shackleton’s heart sank within him as this man began to reach toward the food sack of the man next to him. Shackleton watched as the man opened the food sack and took his own hardtack and put it in the other man’s sack.
In December of 1914, British explorer Ernest Shackleton and his 27-member crew aboard the ship Endurance entered the ice fields of Weddell Sea, navigating through dangerous pack ice. With only 100 miles left in the journey, Shackleton made the fateful decision to stop and wait for a break in the heavy ice. The temperature dropped and the ice closed in around the ship making it impossible to proceed. The crew would live aboard the ship for the next ten months.
Gradually the ship succumbed to the crushing grip of the ice. Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship. The crew began a march in search of safety, carrying minimal supplies and dragging three lifeboats. Eventually reaching open water, they boarded the lifeboats and sailed off in an attempt to find land. Surviving perilous conditions, they finally landed on the deserted Elephant Island.
Stranded on the island, with no hope of rescue, Shackleton and four other crew members set sail in a lifeboat in an effort to reach the island of South Georgia. Traveling 800 miles through the world's worst seas, they arrived only to discover the whaling station was on the other side of the island. In order to rescue the remaining crew in time, Shackleton and two of his men had to cross on foot the treacherous cliffs of the island, which were icy and forbidding, vulnerable to sudden blizzards and hurricane winds. The island's inhabitants considered the journey impossible. Nevertheless, Shackleton and his two partners crossed in 36 hours.
Shackleton's diary provides an interesting perspective on the South Georgia Island crossing:
"I know that during that long and racking march of 36 hours over the unnamed mountains of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that there were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions, but afterwards Worsley said to me, 'Boss, I had a curious feeling that there was another person with us.'"