27 Quotes by Alfred Lansing

No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.

This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe – and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone. The.

For scientific leadership give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the Ice Age – no warmth, no life, no movement. Only those who have experienced it can fully appreciate what it means to be without the sun day after day and week after week. Few men unaccustomed to it can fight off its effects altogether, and it has driven some men mad.

Of all their enemies – the cold, the ice, the sea – he feared none more than demoralization.

In that instant they felt an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment. Though they had failed dismally even to come close to the expedition’s original objective, they knew now that somehow they had done much, much more than ever they set out to do.

In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.

It was now light twenty-four hours a day; the sun disappeared only briefly near midnight, leaving prolonged, magnificent twilight. Often during this period, the phenomenon of an “ice shower,” caused by the moisture in the air freezing and settling to earth, lent a fairyland atmosphere to the scene.

Whatever his mood – whether it was gay and breezy, or dark with rage – he had one pervading characteristic: he was purposeful.