Endurance, SECTION 7: Part 4, Ch 1-2



A piece of ice, just big enough to camp on for the
 night, but not sturdy enough to sleep
 without worry of the ice cracking



            In this portion of the book, the Shackleton and his team leave Patience Island and head out in three handcrafted boats: the James Caird, the Dudley Docker, and the Stancomb Wills. They embark on yet another journey hoping to reach land before winter falls once again. Using teamwork at its finest, the crew manages to row many miles in just a few days with hardly any rest and just enough food to get by. The quandaries have not ceased yet though, since finding and setting up places to sleep is one of the riskiest of all the tasks they withstand. But the crew finds a way to succeed every time, never letting fear hinder the clear motive of surviving yet another Antarctic night.

It relates to me in that its almost like studying for a vocab test. I can cram study the ten words that will be on tomorrow’s test and have them memorized and then forgotten the next day, or I can study all of my accumulative words a little bit each day, and prepare myself for the final and the test Friday. In the long run, the second plan will benefit me the most, though it might be harder to motivate myself to study every day.

Their goal was to reach this island; it was their
best bet for rescue

I feel that motivation is the best literary term to use in this section. Shackleton changed his mind about going to the nearest land, and instead, made their destination to King Geoge Island. Lansing made his motivation for this unexpected change of mind clear, “Here the remains of a volcano’s cone …was a frequent port of call for whalers. Too, there was thought to be a cache of food at Deception Island…But most important, there was a small, rude chapel there…they could use tear down the church and use its lumber to build a boat large enough to accommodate all of them.” Shackleton took risk in choosing this to be their goal, but he knew that it would ultimately be their best bet at getting out of their situation the quickest.