If you’ve read much of my stuff before, you know that I have a soft spot in my heart for Earnest Shackleton and his crew’s experience aboard—and ultimately offboard—his Antarctic ship The Endurance way back in 1914-1916. I’ve gushed over books like Endurance and South and will likely look up even more books of the same ilk in the years to come. For now, I’m satisfying myself with an episodic trip down memory lane through Nick Bertozzi’s delightful graphic novel, Shackleton: Arctic Odyssey.

This book is nowhere near an exhaustive take on the adventure (to have accomplished that, Nick says, he would have had to have drawn until his hands fell right off), but it’s detailed enough to give even the uninitiated a taste for the adventure that makes up this, the most epic of survival stories. Plus, Bertozzi’s monochromatic artwork bears much of the explanatory weight than normal prose requires.

What I loved perhaps most about this book were the introductory and back-story pages describing previous attempts at Antarctic exploration. Bertozzi’s well-mapped descriptions of characters, goals, equipment, hazards, and consequences all on just a few pages tell as much of the history as is required (and I feel like l learned more here than in explanations made in the books mentioned above! Perhaps I’m a visual learner after all?)

Of necessity, Bertozzi takes occasional license with this story, mixing scenes when plausible so as to fit as much of the adventure into the pages as possible. Still, he covers the most major of milestones and keeps the story moving, especially through the steely determination and decisions of Commander Shackleton.

We witness life on the ship both in rough seas and as it plows through the ice floes. We find it wedged and wintering in the ice and watch as the men abandon ship before she’s crushed and sunk beneath the weight of that frozen underworld. We watch the men trudge across the ice in search of open water and land. We hear the shots that kill the last of the dogs and feel the pangs of hunger as the men survive on nothing but meat and fat.

Finally, once then men land on Elephant Island, we get to join Shackleton and his skeleton crew as they risk everything to sail the tiny James Caird lifeboat 700 miles across the world’s most dangerous seas in search of rescue amongst the whalers on South Georgie Island. Even when they reach that land, the men are still 20 miles short of their goal and must climb ice-sheered mountains without equipment or provisions.

There’s no greater name for the ship or the story than Endurance, and this entire epic from beginning to end is filled with lessons for life and living. I loved reliving it all through this graphic novel and wouldn’t mind adding this one to my all-time collection. Fit with humor, adventure, sorrow, and excitement, this thing is worth my reading again.

©2021 E.T.