Twenty-eight men stood on the frozen Weddell Sea at 8.5 below zero and listened to their ship scream.
On October 27, 1915, the pack ice gripped Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, in a vise, buckling her deck while seawater poured into the hold.
Frank Hurley, the expedition photographer, wrote in his diary that day: “We are homeless & adrift on the sea ice.”
They’d set out to become the first men to cross Antarctica on foot, about 1,800 miles via the South Pole. Now the nearest food and shelter was a hut 346 miles away.
The ship’s surgeon, Alexander Macklin, wrote down what the Boss told them: “Ship and stores have gone, so now we’ll go home.”
10 months later, all 28 were alive. Shackleton got them there with small daily habits... and 4 of them work fine when you have a nasty week in 2026.
Welcome to the doom-free zone, friends... where we ditch the doomerism on our phones for gorgeous art, great books, and tough-as-nails men of the past (Shackleton qualifies).
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They sailed the week the world went to war
Britain mucked things up when it went to war on August 4, 1914. Shackleton offered his ship to the Admiralty, where Winston Churchill was in charge, and got a one-word answer:
“Proceed.”
Roger that, Winston.
Shackleton named her after his family motto, Fortitudine vincimus... by endurance we conquer.
Whalers on South Georgia warned him the pack ice that year was nasty….the worst they’d seen. He sailed anyway on December 5, 1914, and on January 18, 1915, the ice locked around the ship, a day’s sail from where they meant to land.
For nine months she drifted with the pack. Food wasn’t the problem yet... the men shot seals and penguins and ate in a warm room below deck they called the Ritz.
The dark was the problem.
The sun dropped below the horizon on May 1, 1915, and didn’t come back until late July. Months of lamplight, the same 27 faces across the table, and nothing to do but listen to the ice groan against the hull.
Picture your worst February, then switch off the sun for 12 weeks. It could drive you bonkers.
So they got creative.
They shaved each other’s heads for laughs, and in midwinter they raced the dog teams out of their igloo kennels (dogloos, naturally) in what they called the Antarctic Derby, betting chocolate and cigarettes.
The crushed hull hung in the ice’s grip for nearly a month. Then, around 5 p.m. on November 21, 1915, the floes let go. Her stern rose, and she went down.
Home was now a slab of drifting ice.
497 days without solid ground
The men lived on the floe until April 9, 1916, when it cracked under the camp. They crammed into three open boats. Fought sleet and loose ice for six days to Elephant Island, the first solid ground under their boots in 497 days.
Shackleton wrote that some of them let pebbles trickle through their fingers “like misers gloating over hoarded gold.”
Nobody ever called at Elephant Island. So on April 24, Shackleton and five men pushed off in the James Caird, a 22-and-a-half-foot lifeboat, for South Georgia, about 800 miles across the Southern Ocean in winter.
They reached South Georgia on May 10... on the wrong side of the island. Shackleton, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean drove boat screws into their boot soles and set out at 3 a.m. under a full moon, over mountains nobody had ever crossed. Thirty-six hours later they staggered into the Stromness whaling station.
Shackleton asked the manager when the war had ended. (The men told it that way afterward.) The war hadn’t ended, and millions were dead. Seventeen months without a single headline... and the war went on, awful as ever, without their worrying.
Most of us can’t go 17 minutes without reading the news.
On August 30, 1916, Shackleton stood in the bow of the Chilean tug Yelcho off Elephant Island and shouted, “Are you all well?”
“We are all well, Boss.”
So how’d the Boss keep 28 men from losing it for 10 months? And what does any of that have to do with the doom machine in your pocket? Plenty... starting with a pile of gold in the snow.
Drop the gold, keep the banjo
On the first morning on the ice, Shackleton set the limit at two pounds of personal stuff per man.
Alfred Lansing, who interviewed survivors for his 1959 book Endurance, says the Boss went first. He dropped a gold cigarette case and a handful of gold sovereigns in the snow.
But Shackleton wisely allowed one exception.
Leonard Hussey’s 12-pound banjo. Shackleton called it a vital mental tonic.
Love this part more than any other.
Twenty-eight men on drifting ice, every ounce counted as weight to carry hundreds of miles. The Boss made room for a banjo. Hussey played it on the floe and again on Elephant Island, and the men sang along.
Tip: Drop your own gold this week. Unfollow 5 accounts that put you in a bad mood and give that time to your banjo... the guitar in the closet or the sketchbook on the shelf. Give it 4 days.
Bunk with the grumbler
Lansing says Shackleton put the men most likely to stir up trouble in his own tent, Hurley among them. Keep the sparks close enough to stamp out.
Then the sleeping bags: 18 warm reindeer fur, the rest thin wool. The men drew lots, and somehow Shackleton and his officers all drew wool. Lansing calls the draw rigged... the good kind of rigged.
Tip: Find the guy with an attitude in your week, at work or at the Thanksgiving table. Don’t freeze him out... befriend him. Pull up a chair and ask about his kids or his fishing trip, anything but the news.
Give the bad news straight, then party time
On the second morning, Shackleton told the men they’d be lucky to have any tea at all in two months. Then on December 22, three days early, he held Christmas, and the men gorged on the tinned treats too heavy to drag along.
Tip: Got bad news to share this week? Say it plain on Monday, then grill steaks Monday night.
Pack for the rescue every morning
On Elephant Island, Frank Wild kept 21 men alive for four and a half months under two upturned boats. Living on penguin and seal beside a smoky blubber stove.
Every morning, by the men’s later accounts, Wild rolled up his sleeping bag and called out: “Lash up and stow, boys! The Boss may come today.”
Of every line in the Endurance story, that’s the one I’d tape to my bathroom mirror.
Wild had no radio or calendar he trusted, so he packed anyway, 128 mornings running.
One 2024 Flinders University study tied doomscrolling to existential anxiety. Wild’s crew had the opposite habit... every morning they looked out to sea expecting good news.
Tip: Tonight, set out tomorrow’s comeback kit. Running shoes by the door, or the library book on your pillow.
Never lost a man? Almost.
On the far side of Antarctica, Shackleton’s Ross Sea party laid supply depots for the crossing, and three men died doing it.
The war later took two Endurance men at sea: Tim McCarthy in 1917 and Alf Cheetham in 1918.
The men who came home from the ice didn’t hide from the news. They walked straight into it. Marcus Aurelius wrote the rule for that around AD 170... what stands in the way becomes the way.
Her name still shows, 9,869 feet down
On March 5, 2022, 100 years after Shackleton’s burial on South Georgia, a search team found the Endurance 3,008 meters down in the Weddell Sea.
She was upright, about four nautical miles from where Worsley’s sextant had put her 107 years earlier, with ENDURANCE still arched across her stern.
The ice crushed the ship and never touched her name.
We embrace beauty and heroism at Past Passport. We reject the world-is-doomed nonsense your feed sells by the truckload. Join us and watch your creative streak come back... with a fresh dose of optimism about the future riding shotgun.
Bring a friend... and a banjo.
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Embrace beauty and reject doom, my friends.
What got you through your own Endurance moment?