Hero on the Ice

ENDURANCE (282 pp.)--Alfred Lanslnq --McGraw-Hill ($5).

Britain's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1915 was as foolish in conception as it was heroic in outcome. Both ends of the scale were weighted by heavy-jawed Sir Ernest ("The Boss'') Shackleton, who in 1909 had gone to within 97 miles of the South Pole. Shackleton had one trouble: he was a towering egotist. As an apprentice in the British merchant navy, he was termed "the most pigheaded, obstinate boy I have ever come across" by his first skipper. Born a middle-class Irishman, he burned to force his way to the top of Britain's upper crust--and chose the polar route for the expedition.

Though knighted and lionized at 35 for his 1909 journey to Antarctica, Shackleton in 1914 was frantic because the great goals were disappearing. The North Pole had fallen to U.S. Explorer Robert E. Peary in 1909, the South Pole to Norway's Roald Amundsen in 1911. Shackleton conceived a scheme of sailing to the Atlantic coast of Antarctica and sledging across the continent via the Pole to the Pacific. He called it "the largest and most striking of all journeys." The Royal Geographical Society was cool to the idea--as well it might be. The feat was not achieved until 43 years later, when Britain's Sir Vivian Fuchs last year took 99 days to travel the route, using heated tractors and reconnaissance airplanes.

No Prayer of Rescue. Yet Shackleton would not be dissuaded, and Alfred Lansing has crisply re-created one of the most audacious assaults that Antarctica ever defeated. Shackleton sailed from Buenos Aires in October 1914, with 69 dogs, no radio transmitter, and a motley crew of 27 volunteers. He put his faith in Endurance, a barkentine (144 ft. long, 25 ft. wide) with a reinforced hull and 350-h.p. auxiliary steam engine. Three months later Endurance was in the Weddell Sea, a vast, bowl-shaped scoop in the Atlantic coast of Antarctica, and there the ice packs began kneading her.

Shackleton never got closer than 60 miles to his proposed beachhead. Clamped in the vise of a null ice pack for ten months, Endurance drifted 1,000 miles northward off the Palmer Peninsula. Finally the party abandoned the crushed wreck and stood on the floe, some 300 miles from land. The men tried dragging boats across the ice in search of open water; they had to quit after two miles. For five more months, they camped in the open, drifting, drifting. There was the sad rite of shooting the dogs, the terror of being dragged off the ice by vicious 1,100-Ib. sea leopards that could leap from the water and catch a running man. The expedition physicist scrawled in his tattered diary: "A bug on a single molecule of oxygen in a gale of wind would have about the same chance of predicting where he was likely to finish up."

No Life Lost. Eventually, the ice began to break up in 30-ft. swells. Shackleton ordered his crazed, frostbitten men into the boats, and after a week somehow managed to make a landfall--the first in 497 days--on tiny, tide-swept Elephant Island. Then with five men, he set off on one of the most remarkable small-boat voyages ever recorded. In 14 days he sailed a 22-ft. boat 800 miles through incessant gales and 90-ft. high waves to the west coast of South Georgia. Impossible? But there was the next leg of the journey: scrambling 29 miles across the island's glaciers to reach an east-coast whaling station. They did it in 28 hours. When they tottered into town, the whalers burst into tears at the sight of them.

It took Shackleton three more months to get back to his men on Elephant Island. But on Aug. 30, 1916, two years after leaving England, he finally brought his party to safety as he had sworn to.

Author Lansing, a onetime United Press rewriteman and Collier's staff writer, draws heavily on scholarly studies of the expedition, has also carefully rechecked the sources. And he has a good newspaperman's respect for telling in unexcited prose the breathless story of men in peril. Dominating all is Shackleton, the incredible leader, the fool-hero who never surrendered. Shackleton was dead within six years, felled by a heart attack at 48, as he mounted yet another assault on Antarctica. It may have been just as well. His finest hour as an explorer was when he brought the battered Trans-Antarctic Expedition back to civilization and proudly wrote to his wife: "Not a life lost, and we have been through Hell."

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