The big news this week is that Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been found. It was nearly 10,000 feet below the surface off the coast of Antarctica. Harriet Sherwood reports:
The Endurance22 expedition, which set off from Cape Town a month ago, had “reached its goal”, said Dr John Shears, the veteran geographer who led the expedition. “We have made polar history with the discovery of Endurance, and successfully completed the world’s most challenging shipwreck search.”
He hoped people would be inspired by “what human beings can achieve and the obstacles they can overcome when they work together”.
Arcing across the submerged ship’s wooden stern is its famous name, preserved by the freezing waters and the absence of wood-eating organisms.
Check out these photos of the ship.
All twenty-seven members of Shackleton’s crew survived the loss of the ship. Kieran Mulvaney tells the story of how they eventually made it to the now abandoned whaling station in Stromness, South Georgia:
The initial plan was to march across the ice toward land, but that was abandoned after the men managed just seven and a half miles in seven days… Slowly and steadily, the ice drifted farther to the north; and, on April 7, 1916, the snow-capped peaks of Clarence and Elephant Islands came into view, flooding them with hope.
“The floe has been a good friend to us,” wrote Shackleton in his diary, [“but it is reaching the end of its journey, and is liable at any time now to break up.” On April 9, it did just that, splitting beneath them with an almighty crack. Shackleton gave the order to break camp and launch the boats, and all at once, they were finally free of the ice that had alternately bedeviled and supported them.
Now they had a new foe to contend with: the open ocean. It threw freezing spray in their faces and tossed frigid water over them, and it batted the boats from side to side and brought brave men to the fetal position as they battled the elements and seasickness.
Through it all, Captain Worsley navigated through the spray and the squalls, until after six days at sea, Clarence and Elephant Islands appeared just thirty miles ahead. The men were exhausted. Worsley had by that stage not slept for 80 hours. And while some were crippled by seasickness, others were wracked with dysentery. Frank Wild, Shackleton’s second-in-command, wrote that “at least half the party were insane.” Yet they rowed resolutely toward their goal, and on April 15, they clambered ashore on Elephant Island.
It was the first time they had been on dry land since leaving South Georgia 497 days previously. But their ordeal was far from over. The likelihood of anybody coming across them was vanishingly small, and so after nine days of recuperation and preparation, Shackleton, Worsley and four others set out in one of the lifeboats, the James Caird, to seek help from a whaling station on South Georgia, more than 800 miles away.
In other news
Have we reached “peak subscription”? Amanda Mull thinks so:
The subscription model has proliferated over the past decade for similar reasons across markets, according to Robbie Kellman Baxter, the principal at Peninsula Strategies and the author of two books on subscription businesses. Online shopping desensitized people to giving out their credit-card number. Software that businesses employ to create and manage subscription programs has become widely available and easier to use. People who have had a good experience with a ubiquitous subscription service — Netflix or Spotify or Amazon Prime — will generally be more open to trying more. But the most important reason, Baxter told me, is that subscription services, when run well, are extremely good business. They make customers more loyal and provide steady, predictable revenue and detailed data on how each individual behaves. That can make a business not only more stable, but also a more attractive target for investment. The downside of the model’s popularity is that it has generated tons of bad subscriptions.
Ken Lima-Coelho is on the board of Canada’s Honens International Piano Competition, and he’s “proud” of the organization’s decision to ban Russian teenagers from the 2022 competition just for being Russian. Honens’s statement reads: “Honens abhors and condemns any form of violence and is deeply disturbed by the Russian government’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Such blatant acts of aggression and greed have no place in our world.” Are these bans of Russian artists motivated by principle or rather by anger at the fact that “aggression and greed” are inescapable parts of the world we live in, as Putin’s invasion shows, no matter how much we might like to deny it? I wonder.
Alexander Larman recommends a reboot of the film adaptation of Len Deighton’s The IPCRESS File:
Purists will carp. (Purists always carp. That’s why they’re called purists.) But the new ITV series based on the novel is a generally enjoyable mixture of homage and reinvention. Yes, Joe Cole’s Harry Palmer, a morally dubious former British Army sergeant who is recruited to help MI5 find a missing nuclear scientist, is clearly styled to look and act in a fairly similar fashion to Caine, even down to the dark glasses, and if Tom Hodge’s score made any more obvious nods to Barry and 60s spy music generally, it would find itself going for “a quiet chat” along the Embankment with a shady figure called Nigel. James Watkins’ direction has so much love for the tilted Dutch camera angle in scenes, that one begins to wonder if one’s screen is on the blink. Still this is a worthwhile revisit that should ensure that Sunday evening espionage drama remains a constant in many households.
Cathy Young takes a stab at defending Ayn Rand’s novels. She praises We the Living in particular, which, if you are going to defend Rand’s novels, is where you need to go. It’s much better than Atlas Shrugged, even if it is similar in some respects to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. I once assigned We the Living to unsuspecting students at UNC at Chapel Hill. They all liked it. I wonder what they’d think of it now.
As many of you already know, the wide-ranging critic and Shakespearean Paul A. Cantor died at the end of February. Anne E. Bromley remembers his broad influence.
Bernard Carr, a friend of the late physicist Stephen Hawking, reviews Charles Seife’s account of the man and the scientist:
Despite being blessed by four popes and interred in Westminster Abbey, Hawking was no saint. He had failings, and doubtless the frustrations of being confined to a wheelchair for fifty years did not always bring out the best in him. He could be difficult, erratic, and he did not suffer fools gladly. On one occasion, when I made a remark in the department common room that showed I had misunderstood what he had been saying, he screamed “No!” so loudly that his wheelchair shot back halfway across the room under the recoil . . . In discussing Hawking’s personal relationships, Seife leans heavily on media sources, and, in particular, a selection of revealing quotations from Hawking’s first wife, Jane, and comments by family members. None was interviewed directly by Seife for the book. The public may have an appetite for these revelations, but they add little to Seife’s account. Hawking may have had a strong libido, but does it really matter if he visited strip clubs?
A study suggests that only 9 percent of manuscripts produced between 600 and 1450 AD survive today. Of course, that just refers to the actual documents, not the stories contained in them: “Icelandic and Irish literature boasted relatively high survival rates for both individual manuscripts (17 percent and 19 percent, respectively) and overall works (77 percent and 81 percent, respectively), as well as similar evenness profiles—perhaps because they were produced on relatively isolated islands.”
