Hannibal and Me by Andreas Kluth

Author:Andreas Kluth [Kluth, Andreas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101554197
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-01-04T18:30:00+00:00

The explorer Ernest Shackleton, a brooding Anglo-Irish man with a wide face and a deep brogue, is a good example of the second aspect of a Fabian response to disaster, of seeing the wisdom of nondoing.

Shackleton in his youth had the audacious dream of crossing the Antarctic continent. In this he resembled Meriwether Lewis, who had had the American equivalent of that dream—crossing the North American continent to explore the Louisiana Purchase—a century earlier. Shackleton had already been to the Antarctic twice, in 1901 and 1907, but had never reached the South Pole. Then, in 1912, a Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, beat him to it, followed by another Briton, Robert Scott, who died while trying to get back to his base. So Shackleton chose a new and even bigger quest: he decided to cross the entire Antarctic continent on foot. It was as daring in 1914 as it had been in 218 BCE for Hannibal to cross the Alps, or from 1803 to 1806 for Meriwether Lewis to cross North America to the Pacific.

Like Hannibal and Lewis, Shackleton prepared meticulously. His plan was to take a ship into the Weddell Sea on the side of the continent facing South America, where six men and seventy dogs would disembark and set off for the pole on sleds. Simultaneously, a second ship would sail into the Ross Sea on the side of Antarctica facing New Zealand and Australia. Its crew would deposit rations at various caches that the group on sleds could later use on the second half of its journey.

Shackleton chose a Norwegian ship with three masts and a coal-fired steam engine, made from specially treated oaks and firs. The ship had an extra-thick keel and sides and a sheathing of steel-hard greenheart wood that he hoped would be tough enough to withstand the chafing of the ice. It was the strongest wooden ship ever built in Norway and probably the world. Shackleton’s family motto was Fortitudine vincimus, “By endurance we conquer.”26 So he christened his ship the Endurance.

Out of many volunteers, Shackleton chose twenty-seven men and sailed from London in August 1914, just as war was breaking out in Europe. By November, the Endurance pulled into her last port on the desolate island of South Georgia between South America and the Antarctic. Then, in early December, at the height of the southern hemisphere’s summer, she was off to the Weddell Sea. Another seaman had smuggled himself on board, so the Endurance now carried twenty-eight. There were also sixty-nine huskies on board.

The Weddell Sea is a roughly circular sea between three landmasses, the Antarctic mainland, Antarctica’s long and thin Palmer Peninsula, and the South Sandwich Islands. Much of the sea is covered with ice, some loose, some dense. The ice mostly stays in the Weddell Sea and moves in a slow clockwise semicircle, away from the eastern side and toward the Palmer Peninsula on the western side. Shackleton was aiming for that eastern side, hoping that the ice was loose enough for the Endurance to sail through.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.