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sophia_sol) wrote2017-12-11 09:57 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2017-12-11 09:57 pm
South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition, 1914–17, by Ernest Shackleton
This is Ernest Shackleton's memoir of an expedition he led to Antarctica in the early 20th century. As the book title more or less indicates.
The expedition's intention was that this would be the first complete overland crossing of Antarctica from one side to the other. This was definitely not achieved. The part of the expedition that was planning to do the overland crossing never even made landfall! And yet everyone still got to spend multiple years enduring remarkable hardship in the unforgiving weather of Antarctica with not enough gear. Good times.
I'm frankly astonished only 3 men died out of the whole expedition of 56 men. (Yes, they were all men. Of course they were.)
This book is full of things like daily logs from sledging expeditions which go on for pages about: distance travelled, coordinates reached, the day's weather, the day's snow condition, the food available. Which you would think would get tedious. But the book as a whole adds up to a remarkably riveting account despite the occasional boring passages. Though the book is also at its strongest for the parts where Shackleton can talk about the part of the expedition he had first-hand experience with; the bits about the parties on the other side of the continent were still interesting but suffered some from relying on other people's accounts.
The thing that struck me the most, while reading this book, is just how much awfulness a human is capable of withstanding and still remaining both alive and somehow relatively cheerful. What the fuck. How is that even how humans work. It's ridiculous.
And how did they not die of cold and hunger a million times over! They're always talking about how their clothes are falling to pieces, their sleeping bags are practically useless, they're constantly getting soaking wet and not having any ability to dry their gear or themselves or even to change into a fresh set of clothes/sleeping bags, they're regularly not able to get all the daily calories they need, the weather is often in the neighbourhood of like -30 Celsius (-20ish F), their tents are in tatters, they don't have enough fuel and/or matches to produce heat for any purpose except cooking, and on and on and on it goes.
And the other thing that gets me about this is that the men who do this are the sort of men who, when given another opportunity to endure the same miseries on another Antarctic expedition, will happily volunteer.
How is the entirety of humanity not dead from sheer bullheaded willingness to do perilous things??? (I suppose because humanity also includes people like me, the most risk-averse person you can imagine. I guess we balance out.)
Anyways reading this book while I was in India was a pretty weird experience because I was perspiring in +35 Celsius (95 F) weather in the full sun in a desert while reading about people huddled together in a makeshift tent on a benighted Antarctic island in the perpetual darkness of polar winter. Talk about contrast.
Also I spent pretty much the entirety of my time reading this book with one of two songs stuck in my head:
1. Waiting for Isabella, which is a lovely haunting song about being stuck in the ice at the north pole rather than the south pole but still has a great deal of relevance
2. We're On Our Way, a song from the extremely ridiculous musical Ernest Shackleton Loves Me! which I've never seen but am familiar with from skygiants' excellent recap. I don't know this song as well so mostly I just had the line "I promise my love we're gonna find land" on repeat. This song technically also has a lot of relevance to the book but also is, you know, extremely ridiculous.
Also, another disparate thought. At one point in the book there is a sentence that is obviously-to-me a quote from a poem that I happen to have memorized. Okay cool, books of the era do a lot of literature references because they assume all readers are familiar with the same works the writers are. But whenever I do manage to catch a reference like this I always wonder HOW MANY OTHERS AM I MISSING. Because this sentence wasn't at all set apart from the text to indicate it was a poetry quote. It was just a sentence like any other. Except that it was a line from The Call of the Wild by Robert Service.
(But then, hilariously, when I go googling that line in particular, the first several google results are all from those sorts of "quotes from famous people" websites that cite this line as being by Ernest Shackleton.)
The expedition's intention was that this would be the first complete overland crossing of Antarctica from one side to the other. This was definitely not achieved. The part of the expedition that was planning to do the overland crossing never even made landfall! And yet everyone still got to spend multiple years enduring remarkable hardship in the unforgiving weather of Antarctica with not enough gear. Good times.
I'm frankly astonished only 3 men died out of the whole expedition of 56 men. (Yes, they were all men. Of course they were.)
This book is full of things like daily logs from sledging expeditions which go on for pages about: distance travelled, coordinates reached, the day's weather, the day's snow condition, the food available. Which you would think would get tedious. But the book as a whole adds up to a remarkably riveting account despite the occasional boring passages. Though the book is also at its strongest for the parts where Shackleton can talk about the part of the expedition he had first-hand experience with; the bits about the parties on the other side of the continent were still interesting but suffered some from relying on other people's accounts.
The thing that struck me the most, while reading this book, is just how much awfulness a human is capable of withstanding and still remaining both alive and somehow relatively cheerful. What the fuck. How is that even how humans work. It's ridiculous.
And how did they not die of cold and hunger a million times over! They're always talking about how their clothes are falling to pieces, their sleeping bags are practically useless, they're constantly getting soaking wet and not having any ability to dry their gear or themselves or even to change into a fresh set of clothes/sleeping bags, they're regularly not able to get all the daily calories they need, the weather is often in the neighbourhood of like -30 Celsius (-20ish F), their tents are in tatters, they don't have enough fuel and/or matches to produce heat for any purpose except cooking, and on and on and on it goes.
And the other thing that gets me about this is that the men who do this are the sort of men who, when given another opportunity to endure the same miseries on another Antarctic expedition, will happily volunteer.
How is the entirety of humanity not dead from sheer bullheaded willingness to do perilous things??? (I suppose because humanity also includes people like me, the most risk-averse person you can imagine. I guess we balance out.)
Anyways reading this book while I was in India was a pretty weird experience because I was perspiring in +35 Celsius (95 F) weather in the full sun in a desert while reading about people huddled together in a makeshift tent on a benighted Antarctic island in the perpetual darkness of polar winter. Talk about contrast.
Also I spent pretty much the entirety of my time reading this book with one of two songs stuck in my head:
1. Waiting for Isabella, which is a lovely haunting song about being stuck in the ice at the north pole rather than the south pole but still has a great deal of relevance
2. We're On Our Way, a song from the extremely ridiculous musical Ernest Shackleton Loves Me! which I've never seen but am familiar with from skygiants' excellent recap. I don't know this song as well so mostly I just had the line "I promise my love we're gonna find land" on repeat. This song technically also has a lot of relevance to the book but also is, you know, extremely ridiculous.
Also, another disparate thought. At one point in the book there is a sentence that is obviously-to-me a quote from a poem that I happen to have memorized. Okay cool, books of the era do a lot of literature references because they assume all readers are familiar with the same works the writers are. But whenever I do manage to catch a reference like this I always wonder HOW MANY OTHERS AM I MISSING. Because this sentence wasn't at all set apart from the text to indicate it was a poetry quote. It was just a sentence like any other. Except that it was a line from The Call of the Wild by Robert Service.
(But then, hilariously, when I go googling that line in particular, the first several google results are all from those sorts of "quotes from famous people" websites that cite this line as being by Ernest Shackleton.)
no subject
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BUT WE'VE BRAVED THEM BEFORE AND WE'LL BRAVE THEM AGAIN
FOR MY LOVE, IT IS TIMELESS AND VAST AS THE SKIES
IT'S AS STRONG AS THE TIDE AND THE WAVES WHEN THEY RISE
IT IS I, ERNEST SHACKLETON, HERE IN COMMAND
AND I PROMISE MY DARLING .... WE'RE GONNA FIND LAND!!!!!!
(this is a song that must be sung in allcaps)
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I think my favorite WHOA WHAT aspect was the part about the way the timing shook out so that they missed everything between the declaration of war in July 1914 to the discovery that it had been going on for, what was it, two years at that point? When he asked his friend at the whaling station how long the war had lasted and who'd won, and got @_____@ in reply, I just had to put down the book and go "OH GEEZ" at the wall for a second or three.
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And yeah I had really not put together the date of the expedition with the dates of the war and then it was really weird to realize just how completely they were cut off from world news about the war, and for so long!