27 Quotes by Alfred Lansing

I long for some rest, free from thought.

I have a great many opinions about writing, but I’m afraid that all of them are unprintable.

And all the defenses they had so carefully constructed to prevent hope from entering their minds collapsed.

It was as if they had suddenly emerged into infinity. They had an ocean to themselves, a desolate, hostile vastness. Shackleton thought of the lines of Coleridge: Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea.

And in the space of a few short hours, life had been reduced from a highly complex existence, with a thousand petty problems, to one of the barest simplicity in which only one real task remained – the achievement of the goal.

They thought of home, naturally, but there was no burning desire to be in civilization for its own sake. Worsley recorded: “Waking on a fine morning I feel a great longing for the smell of dewy wet grass and flowers of a Spring morning in New Zealand or England. One has very few other longings for civilization – good bread and butter, Munich beer, Coromandel rock oysters, apple pie and Devonshire cream are pleasant reminiscences rather than longings.

But the dawn did come – at last.

A forbidding-looking place, certainly, but that only made it seem the more pitiful. It was the refuge of twenty-two men who, at that very moment, were camped on a precarious, storm-washed spit of beach, as helpless and isolated from the outside world as if they were on another planet. Their plight was known only to the six men in this ridiculously little boat, whose responsibility now was to prove that all the laws of chance were wrong – and return with help. It was a staggering trust.

The whole undertaking was criticized in some circles as being too “audacious.” And perhaps it was. But if it hadn’t been audacious, it wouldn’t have been to Shackleton’s liking. He was, above all, an explorer in the classic mold – utterly self-reliant, romantic, and just a little swashbuckling.