16 books like Shackleton's Boat Journey

Ships and boats are good settings for conflict; physical, sociological, and psychological.

No wind to drive the ship, a sick crew, and a mentally unstable first mate beleaguered by the ghost of the previous captain are trials the young captain must deal with. As in all of Conrad's fiction, there is plenty of insight into the human condition revealed through the characters and felt in the subtext. I classify it as a coming-of-age at sea story, drawn from Conrad's own experiences. "Coming-of-age" does not mean "young adult" in my life dictionary. It may continue well beyond the teen years.

I loved this book for its fantastical portrayal of a Pacific voyage that mirrors the internal conflicts many of us face. Like Pi, who embraced multiple faiths during his ordeal, I searched for answers to reconcile my faith and sexuality across various denominations, religions, and philosophies.

Pi’s story as he journeys across the Pacific, a tiger in tow, allowed me to reflect on the moments when I felt alone, wrestling with my faith in the face of an overwhelming challenge, given my fundamentalist upbringing. 

Richard Hughes has always been my favorite under-read author. I tell people he writes as though he were the love child of A. A. Milne and Joseph Conrad.

A High Wind begins in an idyllic Caribbean setting, with the five Thornton and two Fernandez children living in what seems to be pre-lapsarian innocence; but Hughes soon plunks them square into the world of “Typhoon” and Lord Jim.

There are hellacious hurricanes and swashbuckling pirates involved, but it’s the pirates that are finally defenseless in the face of the children they unluckily take on board from an England-bound passenger ship. Time and time again, Hughes captures the bizarre ways in which children see the world, just as often warped by imagination as consolidated by fact.

I’m struck by the way his empathy for his characters never guarantees that their fate in his hands will be anything other than brutal.

Studying the journals of the surviving crew, the historian of this real-life nineteenth-century tragedy pieces together the situation aboard the ship that set sail out of Massachusetts for the whaling grounds of the North Pacific. What happens aboard makes the literary Captain Ahab's monomaniacal actions seem heroic in comparison. Druett's true-crime-at-sea story provides a brutal counterpoint to the American epic, Moby Dick, and calls to mind The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, a true account that is said to have inspired Melville. I pick Druett's account because of its historical true-crime approach, and because it is a lesser-known account.

Ernest Shackleton was Scott’s rival and companion, the one who was smart enough not to die. A later Antarctic explorer, Sir Raymond Priestly, famously said, “For scientific discovery give me Scott. For speed and efficiency of travel, give me Amundsen. But when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” Shackleton’s last expedition was the stuff of legend. His ship the Endurance was trapped in the ice for ten months, and finally crushed by the ice and sunk. Shackleton marshalled his men to march across the floes dragging their boat, and then they sailed across the polar seas to Elephant Island where they finally were rescued more than two years after they set out. It’s an almost unbelievable feat.

Ernest Shackleton is now best known for the heroic failure that was his Endurance Expedition of 1914-17. But the skills that he displayed to such effect on that expedition were honed during his leadership of the British Antarctic (or Nimrod) Expedition of 1907-09 – an expedition with the conquest of the South Pole as its primary objective. Of course, in the final assessment, this expedition failed as well – because Shackleton turned for home when just 97.5 nautical miles from his objective, knowing that his team would die if he didn’t. Beau Riffenburgh’s account of this much less well-known expedition is masterly: meticulously researched and beautifully written; a joy to read. 

Some of the most famous felt presences are those that occur in survival situations under the name of the “Third Man”.

The name comes from a line in The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot, in which he recalled the story of Antarctic explorers being accompanied by a phantom figure. Tat story was Ernest Shackleton’s: at the end of the ill-fated Endurance expedition, Shackleton experienced something like a felt presence when crossing the interior of South Georgia Island to save the rest of his crew.

He recounts the story of the whole expedition in South, and it’s an amazing read. When I was writing my book, I was really struck by how good a psychologist Shackleton was: he was constantly trying to understand and motivate his crew, while being acutely aware of the impact of the situation and the environment around them.

At several points he directly comments on… show more.

I wanted to end the list with a book that gives a sense of what life in space is like now. Scott Kelly spent a year aboard the International Space Station, returning to Earth in 2016.

Being an astronaut is undoubtedly an incredible experience, and I envy those who have had the chance to look down on the Earth from space. But Kelly’s biography makes clear that the bulk of an astronaut’s day is not comprised of these moments of euphoria.

Lots of time is spent on tasks like maintaining the space station and running experiments, and life in a cramped station orbiting Earth in the void isn’t all fun and games. Carbon dioxide levels get high and give you headaches; from time to time, someone needs to tamp down the poop in the space toilet, and it’s hard to be physically separated from loved ones, especially when something catastrophic… show more.

In an amazing feat of leadership and critical decision-making under the most stressful circumstances imaginable, Ernest Shackleton managed to save his entire crew – despite their ship being crushed in the ice pack of Antarctica. His decisions from start to finish risked everything – hiking to the edge of the sea, sailing one of the ship’s small boats on a voyage to a distant outpost, bringing help back, and saving the crew. His decisions inspired me in the many expeditions I led as a naval officer, none of which were as challenging as what he faced.

Nicola Pierce’s Titanic: True Stories of Her Passengers, Crew and Legacy details not only Titanic’s story, but her sister’s tragedies. It questions whether Bruce Ismay was really a villain and poses the idea that he might be a hero; it critically examines Captain Smith’s behaviour the night of the sinking. It follows the events of the Carpathia and Californian, lending insight into what happened on both ships that night, reminding us the Titanic didn’t just hit an iceberg: She was trapped in an iceberg field. It finishes on the Mackay-Bennett, the funeral ship sent to ferry back as many of Titanic’s dead as they could, reminding us that the tragedy didn’t end on the 15th of April, but would continue for months on end – and for many, years. 

Pierce’s novel was one of my biggest sources for my book. I’d heard of the Mackay-Bennett funeral… show more.