Shackleton's Boat Journey - Couverture rigide

Worsley, Frank Arthur

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 039308759X ISBN 13 : 9780393087598

Editeur : W W Norton & Co Inc, 1977

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

On August 1, 1914, on the eve of World War I, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his hand-picked crew embarked in HMS Endurance from London's West India Dock, for an expedition to the Antarctic. It was to turn into one of the most breathtaking survival stories of all time. Even as they coasted down the channel, Shackleton wired back to London to offer his ship to the war effort. The reply came from the First Lord of the Admiralty, one Winston Churchill: "Proceed." And proceed they did. When the Endurance was trapped and finally crushed to splinters by pack ice in late 1915, they drifted on an ice floe for five months, before getting to open sea and launching three tiny boats as far as the inhospitable, storm-lashed Elephant Island. They drank seal oil and ate baby albatross (delicious, apparently). From there Shackelton himself and seven others - the author among them - went on, in a 22-foot open boat, for an unbelievable 800 miles, through the Antarctic seas in winter, to South Georgia and rescue. It is an extraordinary story of courage and even good-humour among men who must have felt certain, secretly, that they were going to die. Worsley's account, first published in 1940, captures that bulldog spirit exactly: uncomplaining, tough, competent, modest and deeply loyal. It's gripping, and strangely moving.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

... the expedition had been trapped for months in the ice, watched their ship being slowly crushed, walked in appalling conditions to the edge of the ice sheet and in three small boats sailed to Elephant Island . . . From Elephant Island one of the boats was adapted in the desperate gamble of reaching South Georgia. Shackleton and his colleagues navigated by dead reckoning across the stormy Atlantic ocean and they were the first human beings to walk across South Georgia. After three attempts their crew was rescued from Elephant Island. Not a man was lost. Frank Worsley's account of the Shackleton Boat Journey remains the classic account of this extraordinary story. The journey had begun on 1 August 1914 in London and the next the world knew of Shackleton was on 20 May 1916, when three filthy ragged men staggered into the whaling station at Grytviken on South Georgia. In the opening months of the war the fate of Shackleton alternated with war news in the newspapers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even remarked in a speech regarding the British navy: 'We can pass the eight Dreadnoughts, if we are sure of the eight Shackletons.'

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Date d'édition: 1977
• ISBN 10: 039308759X
• ISBN 13: 9780393087598
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1