#alfred lansing

[wholesomeobsessive]

They were on their way at last, really on their way, and Shackleton was immensely relieved. The long years of preparation were over ... the begging, the hypocrisy, the finagling, all were finished. The simple act of sailing had carried him beyond the world of reversals, frustrations, and inanities. And in the space of a few short hours, life had been reduced from a highly complex existence, with a thousand petty problems, to one of the barest simplicity in which only one real task remained-the achievement of the goal.

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

[wholesomeobsessive]

Few men could be more forbidding than Ernest Shackleton in a rage, and now, squarely facing Blackboro, his huge shoulders hunched, Shackleton berated the young Welsh stowaway mercilessly. Blackboro was terrified. Bakewell, How, and McLeod, standing helplessly by, never had expected anything of this nature. But then, at the height of his tirade, Shackleton paused abruptly and put his face up close to Blackboro's. "Finally," he thundered, "if we run out of food and anyone has to be eaten, you will be first. Do you understand?"

A smile slowly spread over Blackboro's round, boyish face, and he nodded. Shackleton turned to Worsley and suggested that he assign Blackboro to help Green in the galley.

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

[wholesomeobsessive]

Of all their enemies-the cold, the ice, the sea-he feared none more than demoralization.

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

[wholesomeobsessive]

"... the upshot," wrote James, "is that Elephant and Clarence Group is still the objective and as our present wind is s.W. prospects are a little brighter for the time. The ice got a little closer during the night and the pack is simply swarming with life. We hear and see whales blowing all around absolutely continuously at times. A particularly ugly killer poked his head up and had a look around by our floe. Penguins are croaking... and occasionally a shoal of them swim through a pool with a peculiar leaping movement like great fleas hopping along the water surface, and looking fine in the brilliant sunlight. About twenty seals were visible . .. this morning at one time. Crowds of snow petrels are on the wing, with occasional giant petrels and skua gulls."

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

[wholesomeobsessive]

Worsley thought to himself of the pity of it all. He remembered the diary he had kept ever since the Endurance had sailed from South Georgia almost seventeen months before. That same diary, wrapped in rags and utterly soaked, was now stowed in the forepeak of the Caird. When she went, it would go, too. Worsley thought not so much of dying, because that was now so plainly inevitable, but of the fact that no one would ever know how terribly close they had come.

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

[wholesomeobsessive]

The ship approached to within several hundred yards, then stopped. The men ashore could see a boat being lowered. Four men got into it, followed by the sturdy, square-set figure they knew so well – Shackleton. A spontaneous cheer went up. In fact the excitement ashore was so intense that many men actually were giggling.

Within a few minutes the boat was near enough for Shackleton to be heard. ‘Are you all right?’ he shouted. 

‘All well,’ they replied.

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

[jonathanjudge]

[veryslowreader]

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

NCIS: "Enemy on the Hill"