Finding Endurance – Shackleton, my father and a world without end by Darrel Bristow-Bovey
SPOILERS – You have been warned
This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read.
It chronicles Shackleton’s last big expedition to the antarctic and the monumental tale of survival of the entire crew after years living on the ice or antarctic islands awaiting rescue. But its not just a story of an ill-conceived journey or a tale of survival.
B-B goes out of his way to contextualise the voyage in its time, both why it came about, what the members of the expedition were hoping to get out of it, and what the greater public were expecting. And then in the gut-wrenching finale, what the reaction by the public was to its outcome. Almost all its members had joined the war effort (WWI) within a year of being rescued. Several of them would go on to fight in both world wars.
Endurance is Life
This is so much more than a survival story.
The author does talk a bit about his father (no, his father was not actually on endurance – he was way too young) and about his own life, but with the aim of exploring a central idea of what life means through the lens of Shackleton’s achievements and how he was viewed by his contemporaries.
He spends some time comparing the characters of Shackleton and Scott, trying to understand their relative achievements and failures and the place they each hold in the collective imagination. He speaks of the attractiveness of pessimism, but the importance of optimism, especially for a leader.
There is an optimism not just in the sense of never giving up, but in the determination to always put your men, their lives, their emotional and physical needs first, before your glory.
This is then further developed into the idea of “playing the game”. Isn’t that just the most British phrase? But playing the game is another way of keeping people in their lanes. Because if you play other people’s games by their rules you are sure to lose. Even if you try to play the game with your own rules you are sure to lose because at the end of the day the only way for the game to finish is for you to lose. Its rigged. I’m going to come back to the latter point in a moment. Shackleton came up against this idea repeatedly in his Antarctic exploits and his response was:
When the ship was iced-in and the original goal became impossible, he set himself a new one: get everybody out alive. You can’t lose if you switch to a different game. It was also the central tenant of his leadership.
This last was very powerful for me, who tend to beats myself up over previous mistakes. Since reading this book I find myself spotting these rigged games in all kinds of places in life – and seeing how it holds many of us back from our dreams.
B-B then takes the idea of the game still further by introducing the idea of infinite games. In a finite game there are only ever two outcomes, win or lose. The trick he suggests, is to always find a way to keep playing. The goal is never the end point, but a step along the way. Isn’t that just beautiful? In that perspective Shackleton’s goal:
And, of course, we must consider the expedition not just from the lens of historical fact but as a story. The story Shackleton and his men told themselves about the journey, and the story we tell ourselves about it now. In some ways the expedition was a total failure, they never reached their objective (far, far from it) and thus it was a vast waste of resources. But unlike Scott, Shackleton brought every one of his men out alive.
This gives me goose-bumps every time I read it. Endurance is not just a story of survival in the practical sense but as a lesson in finding a way through all of life’s struggles, in finding how to keep playing the game.
There is a great deal more to this book, about what home means, about climate change (obviously). These were just the parts that resonated with me. Its an incredible book that brings the past to life with meticulous details and powerful descriptions, balanced out with philosophical musings that build gently upon each other. It was an incredibly moving story and I have to ask just how this author managed to both change the way I view life and make me care so much for people who are already long dead.
To Conclude: YOU MUST READ THIS!!!