The Matt Walsh Show - The Legend Of Ernest Shackleton And His Insane Rescue Mission

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

This is the real story of Ernest Shackleton and his adventures to Antarctica. - - - Today's Sponsors: Balance of Nature - Go to https://BalanceofNature.com today and get an additional 10% off the Fruits & Veggies supplements subscription when you use Discount Code: WALSH Mack Weldon - Get moving with Mack Weldon. Comfortable anywhere. Go to https://MackWeldon.com and get 20% off your first order of $125 or more, with promo code WALSH Grand Canyon University - Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University. Visit https://GCU.edu to learn more. - - - DailyWire+: Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In January of 1915, Ernest Shackleton, the captain of the ship in Dorrance, was trapped in the ice, along with his vessel and 27 crew members, about 85 miles from his intended landing point in Antarctica. It was what passes for summer in that part of the world, which meant temperatures hovered around negative 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Within a few short months, winter would settle in fully, temperatures dropping toward negative 30, and the sun disappearing entirely for weeks at a time. Now, during the blizzards that swept across the region, wind chills could fall to extreme levels thanks to sustained winds of 60 to 70 miles an hour. In those conditions, exposed skin freezes within a matter of seconds.

Severe hypothermia follows soon after, then unconsciousness, then death. The 28 men of the endurance were then trapped in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth. The conditions were already severe, and they were only going to get worse, much worse. But the situation was even more dangerous than that. A ship trapped in Arctic pack ice is not like a car buried in snow on your driveway. The vessel was not resting on something stable or fixed. The ice itself is a shifting, grinding, violent mass of enormous slabs constantly in motion, compressing and colliding with whatever lay between them.

When the wind rose, the ice would buckle into pressure ridges, towering walls of frozen blocks of ice that could rise 15 feet or more. Slow moving but immensely powerful, like icy battering ramps. Shackleton could attempt to remain aboard the adorance and wait for the ice to release them when it melts, but he also understood that there was no guarantee it ever would. It might be weeks, it might be months, it might even be years. In 1829, for example, the British explorer John Ross became trapped in the Arctic ice and remained frozen in place for four entire years before finally breaking free.

In 1845, another British expedition under the famous John Franklin set out in search of the Northwest Passage and became trapped in Arctic Ice aboard his ships, the Arabis and terror. Franklin and several of his men died in the stranded ships, waiting for the ice to melt, which it never did. The remaining survivors eventually abandoned ship tried to march south and they were never seen again. But the real danger that one Shackleton would have been thinking about in January of 1915 was not simply being trapped, it was what came next. If the endurance were crushed by the ice and sank, the men would be left stranded on the drifting ice, exposed and isolated with no ship, no shelter, and no supplies beyond what they could carry.

They would be adrift on a frozen ocean, dozens of miles from the nearest solid land, which itself, was an empty, hostile wasteland. If you're looking for an environment comparable to Antarctica, just to give you an idea, you won't find it on Earth. In practical terms, it's closer to another planet than anything most people have experienced on Earth. Indeed, being stranded there in 1915 would have felt less like being lost somewhere on Earth and more like being stranded on Mars. And in fact, 90 years later, in 2005, a French-Italian research facility named Concordia Station

would be established on the Antarctica, plateau. The station dubbed White Mars is still used as a Mars analog by scientists to study the effect of Martian weather and isolation on human beings. And this is where Shackleton and his men were now trapped. The only saving grace for Shackleton was that, at least at first, food was not an immediate concern. The endurance had been well-provisioned, bacon, rice, canned meats, other preserved stores, including supplies intended to prevent scurvy, which is a horrific disease caused by vitamin C deficiency that had killed thousands of sailors across centuries of exploration. And most importantly, of course, there was rum and lots of it.

But if the ship were crushed by the ice, as Shackleton already understood, those stores would be lost, almost all of them, beneath the sea. From that point forward, survival would depend on what could be taken from the environment itself, penguins, seals, seabirds when available. And when those inevitably ran out, there remained only one last resource, the sled dogs. By early 1916, with food supplies exhausted and the men on the edge of starvation, each of the dogs would be taken away behind the ice out of sight of the others and killed for food. It was done quietly without ceremony, and those who carried it out later described it as the worst moment of the entire expedition.

But standing on the endurance in 1915, looking out across the pack ice, stretching to every horizon, Ernest Shackleton could not have been entirely surprised. He knew exactly what he was getting himself into. This was Shackleton's third expedition to the Frozen South. His first came in 1901, when at the age of 27, he joined a team led by the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott in an attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. They made it to the continent and set out overland, traveling on foot and with sled dogs. But the expedition was poorly planned.

They didn't bring enough food nor the right kind of food, and they didn't yet understand how to manage a team of sled dogs. dogs in polar conditions. They pushed farther south than anyone before them, but eventually had to turn back. And by that point, Shackleton himself had fallen ill with scurvy. He had progressed past the early stage of the disease marked by severe fatigue and joint pain. He was entering a more dire phase when hair begins to fall out

and the skin develops dark, putrid splotches. Later stages are even gaslier. The gums deteriorate and bleed, teeth fall out. You cough up blood, old wounds begin to reopen, as the body loses its ability to maintain connective tissue. And in its final form, scurvy becomes a systemic collapse in the whole body. Organs fail, internal bleeding, the body slowly breaking down and eating itself from the inside out. Well, Shackleton was ultimately sent home before it reached that point, but it was a fate that had defined centuries of maritime exploration.

During the age of sail from roughly the 1500s to the 1800s, it's estimated that as many as half of all sailors on long ocean voyages died in this one. Any sailor setting out on a long expedition understood, at least implicitly, that the odds of survival were far from certain, and that the cost of failure would be an agonizing, nightmarish death. And still, they went. Shackleton survived the ordeal, but the expedition failed. They had made it farther south than anyone before them, but not far enough. Robert Falcon Scott would continue the pursuit of the pole. Eventually, he made it there in 1912, along with a small team of four men. Scott reached the South Pole, only to discover that Brold Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer,

had already been there and planted his flag weeks earlier. Defeated Scott and his men turned for home, and none of them survived the return journey. Amundsen himself, by the way, years earlier, had already been the first to successfully navigate the Northwest Passage, a route through the Arctic that had defeated explorers for centuries. After reaching the South Bowl, he would continue to push into polar exploration more broadly, eventually becoming the first person to fly across the Arctic by air in 1928 at the age of 55. He set out in a sea plane as part of a rescue mission for a fellow explorer who had become stranded near the Arctic, and he never returned. Amundsen's legend was born in the polar regions and was perhaps destined to die there. That was true of many of these

explorers. It would be true of Shackleton, too. Parents eventually discover a strange phenomenon. Your children always have food, but somehow you're the one who forgets to eat and all you're running on is a cup of coffee. Happens to the best of us, and that's a one reason I become a fan of Balance of Nature. It's not about trying to live some perfectly optimized lifestyle. It's about finding practical ways to incorporate more whole food ingredients into your routine, even when life gets chaotic. Balance of Nature's whole health system contains 47 ingredients from fruits, vegetable, spices, and fiber, making it an easy addition to your day. Their freeze-dried snacks are great for road trips, tossing in a backpack for the park or grabbing

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But back in 1907, only a few years after his near-death experience with Scott's expedition, Shackleton mounted his own attempt for the pole, this time in command. He explored vast, uncharted regions of Antarctica, and once again set a new record for the farthest south reached. But again, he fell short of the goal, turning back just 97 miles from the prize. After Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1911, Shackleton's ambitions shifted. He proposed a new objective to cross the entire Antarctic continent overland from sea to sea, passing through the pole itself. Now, he knew the risks better than anyone. He had already been pushed to the edge more than once.

He'd already nearly died. And yet he returned once more to the ice. So put yourself in Shackleton's shoes in January of 1950. You have 27 men whose lives depend on you. You're on a ship trapped in the ice, cut off from the outside world completely. No way to send for help. No way to communicate with anyone back home.

The nearest land is a continent where no permanent human settlement exists. You are a student of exploration history, so you know the kinds of dangers that have defined these journeys. And not just the natural ones, but the human ones as well. Stranded expeditions, especially in the polar regions, have been known to break down into chaos, madness. And in some cases, murder and cannibalism. One of the most infamous examples occurred in the early 1880s

when an American expedition under Adolphus Greeley set out to establish a polar research station in the Arctic, 25 men departed, only six survived, and one of the 19 who died was ex-eastern. executed for stealing rations. Most of the rest died from starvation and exposure. And in the final stages, the survivors emaciated, desperate, resorted to cannibalism. This is where situations like this can lead.

These are the stories that would have been rattling around in Shackleton's mind. He knew that in conditions like these, good leadership was the only thing standing between order and collapse. You had to keep your men alive physically, but you also had to keep them steady mentally. You had to preserve discipline and morale and purpose. You couldn't be too lenient or order would dissolve.

You couldn't be too harsh or resentment would turn into mutiny very quickly. The line between the two was narrow and failure on either side of the line is fatal for everybody. Summer has a way of filling up the calendar faster than you expect. Trips, backyard cookouts, vacations, time with family. Suddenly the weekends are gone and you're moving for one thing to the next. When that happens, what you're wearing either keeps up. or it doesn't. Mac Weldon's Air KnitX does. It starts as underwear, and it was good enough that they expanded into a full collection, t-shirts, polos, undershirts, socks. Their lightest fabric is

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That's M-A-C-W-E-L-D-O-N.com, code Walsh. Shackleton was, of course, not a god or a superhero. He was a man with all the faults that that implies. He was capable of pride, irritation, and resentment. And so we can assume that standing on the deck of the endurance in 1915, he felt what any man would feel in that position. Fear, uncertainty, a terrifying awareness of how easily everything can go wrong and what the consequences of that would be.

But he also knew that these feelings could never become apparent to his men. He was the leader. The buck stopped with him. So there was no venting of frustrations or finding a shoulder to cry on. Everyone else could have visible moments of weakness and despair. And they did. But he could not. As the months passed with the ship locked in the ice, Shackleton imposed structure on the crew's life aboard the Endurance.

There were regular wake-up time, scheduled meals, daily chores, physical exercise, scientific observations continued. The expedition, as far as Shackleton was concerned, and as far as he told his men, was still ongoing. At that stage, they still had sufficient food and the ship itself provided relative warmth and shelter. The greatest threat Shackleton understood was not a... immediate physical danger, but psychological collapse, the slow erosion of morale, the creeping sense that they might never escape. And once that feeling took hold and spread like a virus through the crew, there would be no cure. To counter at Shackleton, organized theatrical performances on the ship, comedy, sketches, games,

the ship's banjo player was kept busy. One of the most famous photographs from the expedition shows a group of men playing soccer on the ice with the endurance standing in the background. Birthdays and holidays were observed and celebrated, and throughout it all, Shackleton ate with his men. He remained present among them, maintaining authority, but also familiarity. And nine months passed like this. In October of 1915, the first unmistakable signs of structural failure appeared. The men began hearing sharp, unsettling noises from the ship, as though it were being squeezed in a vice, and in a sense it was.

The ice was closing in from multiple directions, exerting pressure that the hull could not resist indefinitely. Timbers began to crack, beams flexed. The ship was no longer simply frozen in place. It was being actively crushed. It was the moment Shackleton had been preparing for it. He gave the order to abandon ship. The expedition in its original form was officially over. What remained was survival. All 28 men, along with the dogs and what supplies they could carry, evacuated onto the ice. They established a camp nearby, which they called Ocean Camp. A few weeks later, the endurance finally gave away completely and sank beneath the ice. Their last connection to the outside world was gone.

They were now well and truly alone. Now again, try to imagine this. You're stranded on a sheet of ice somewhere near Antarctica. Nobody back home knows where you are. Even if they did, they couldn't reach you. From a statistical perspective, your chances of surviving this experience are basically zero. The only question is what will kill you? Frostbite, starvation, mutiny, maybe a threat.

A fissure in the ice will open up and swallow you while you're sleeping. Maybe a killer whale will break through the thinner portions of the ice and drag you into the deep, mistaking you for a seal. That was not a far-fetched scenario, by the way. In the early days of Robert Falcon Scott's doomed polar quest, the expedition's photographer was standing on an ice flow when out of nowhere, a pod of killer whales swarmed around and tried to break the ice into pieces to tip the photographer and his dogs into the water. He narrowly escaped with his life.

And the point is, there are hazards everywhere you look in that part of the world, and especially in the places that you aren't looking. People who change communities rarely start by trying to change the world. They start small. Over time, their small actions turn into meaningful work, which then turns into impact. The Grand Canyon University students are prepared for that journey through academically rigorous programs designed to help them grow professionally, personally, and spiritually. While many universities are raising costs, GCU has kept tuition rates steady on its traditional

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Purpose isn't something you stumble into, it's something you pursue. Grand Canyon University help students do exactly that. Grand Canyon University, private Christian affordable, nonprofit, learn more at gCU.edu. The men survived on the drifting ice for months. Food stores steadily dwindled. Then came the desperate moment when they killed and ate the dogs. But even those dozens of dogs would not sustain 28 starving men for very very, long, your body burns enormous amounts of energy in extreme cold. Add to that the constant labor required just to keep the camp going, and they were likely burning several thousand calories

a day. Starvation in that environment does not arrive gradually. It closes in fast. And once it has you in its grip, it doesn't let go. But in April of 1916, 20 months after leaving England, 15 months after their ship became trapped in the ice, about six months after they abandoned it, the flows that had imprisoned them finally began to break apart. If this had happened when they had were still on the ship, it would have been cause for celebration. But now they had no ship, only three small lifeboats. And the ground where they had pitched their tents was disintegrating around them. Shackleton ordered his men into the boats. It was the only choice they had. They fought freezing spray, rising winds, exhaustion for days across open water, before finally reaching a small island,

about 150 miles off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. It was the first solid ground any of them had touched in nearly 500 days. But it was not salvation, not even close. Elephant Island, as it's called, is a barren, desolate, wind-swept void, far from any shipping route. No one knew they were there. No one was coming.

They could not stay. If they did, they would all die there slowly, but inevitably. Starvation and scurvy lay ahead for certain. The only question was whether hunger would claim them before the cold. One way or another, nobody was getting out alive. Shackleton realized their only real chance was to sail to the nearest inhabited island,

which is called South Georgia Island. The problem, and it was by all rights, an insurmountable one, was that South Georgia Island lay roughly 800 miles across the most violent ocean on Earth. The route cut through the so-called Furious 50s, where powerful westerly winds circle the globe uninterrupted by land, waves there routinely rise 50 feet or more, sometimes more than 100 feet. And they would have to cross it in a 22-foot lifeboat, about as long as a standard parking space. In the Southern Ocean, waves do not behave like water.

They act more like moving walls, long heaving ridges of water, taller than buildings, rolling endlessly around the planet with nothing to break them. They would have to thread this small wooden boat through this landscape of moving, freezing, liquid mountains. Shackleton knew most of his men were in no condition for that kind of journey. So he organized a rescue party, which he would personally lead along with five others. They set out in a small boat called the James Caird, aiming for a speck of land 800 miles away across open ocean. They had no modern navigation equipment, only a sextant, a chronometer, and brief sightings of the sun and stars whenever the weather allowed, which it rarely did. If they missed their target, the next nearest land was an uninhabited volcanic island nearly a thousand miles farther than that. Beyond that, lay South Africa, more than 2,000 miles beyond.

In other words, if they missed South Georgia, which they almost certainly would, they would die. And more likely than not, they would die before ever knowing how far off course they were. They could carry only a small supply of food, enough for perhaps two or three weeks at sea. And just so you appreciate the navigational challenge, 800 miles. So for reference, that's roughly the distance between Baltimore, Maryland, and the small town of Oswego, Kansas. Now imagine being dropped in Baltimore told to find Oswego with no GPS and no map. You're not allowed to ask for directions and all the highway signs along the way will be covered up. Now go, good luck.

Now of course, that challenge, given that you're on solid ground, you can drive a car, you can stop for food whenever you want, you're not already exhausted from spending 500 days stranded in the Antarctic, is vastly easier than what Shackleton faced. Your expedition from Baltimore to Oswego would require only a tiny, a tiny fraction of the skill, ingenuity, and courage, and yet I'd be willing to bet that most people today could not do it. Now imagine I put you on a tiny boat, took away your GPS, your radio maps, and means of communication, pointed vaguely towards an island 800 miles away, and gave you enough food to survive less

than a month. I'm betting that almost everybody in the country, myself certainly included, would be dead within a couple of weeks. I'll even let you attempt it in the comparatively mild waters of the mid-Atlantic, and it would still be a death sentence. And yet, 16 days later, after braving towering seas, nearly capsizing more times than they could count, and exhaustion so deep that they were barely conscious, they reached South Georgia Island. Every man aboard was still alive. They had completed what is widely regarded as one of the greatest small boat voyages in history. But even then, the journey

was not over. They had landed on the uninhabited southern coasts of the island, the whaling stations they needed were on the northern side. Now, they couldn't sail around to it because the boat was too damaged. Their only option was to cross on foot. And that meant traversing an unmapped mountainous interior that no one had ever crossed in history. Now, at that point, they could barely walk.

They were malnourished, starving, frostbidden, soaked to the bone, exhausted beyond measure. And still, another journey began. For 36 straight hours without stopping, they climbed and descended through mountains over ridges, across glaciers and through terrain no human had ever charted or even seen, until finally they reached the whaling station on the far side. They arrived looking less like men than ghosts, as you can imagine.

But there was no time to rest. Shackleton immediately took a ship and set out to rescue the men he had left behind. And he did. It took several attempts and a few more months, but eventually every last man was recovered. Not a single life was lost. All 28 survived. It stands as one of the greatest feats of leadership in the entire history of the human race. Now, when people hear the story of Ernest Shackleton, the first question is always how? How did he do it? How did he keep 28 men, including himself alive after their ship was crushed? How did he maintain order under conditions that should have descended into chaos almost

immediately? How did he navigate 800 miles of the most turbulent seas on the planet in a boat the size of an SUV? How did he cross an uncharted mountain range? after nearly two years of deprivation. Well, the how is an interesting question, but the why is more mysterious. I mean, why do any of it at all?

Why leave the safety of home to sail toward a frozen wilderness that offers only suffering and death? Why go somewhere where so many people before you failed and disappeared and froze, starved, went insane or worse? The modern mind struggles with questions like these, because we've been trained to think in terms of utility. We ask what something achieves, what it produces, what practical benefit it delivers.

But some things resist that kind of calculation. There's nothing practical about crossing oceans and wooden ships to reach unknown lands. There's nothing practical about climbing mountains simply because they exist. Nothing practical about pushing into deserts and jungles and ice fields and all the blank spaces at the edge of the map. And yet civilization was built by people who did exactly those things. That's why these stories matter. years after returning from his ordeal, Shackleton set out to the Antarctic for his fourth voyage. While anchored in his ship off the coast of South Georgia Island, he had a heart attack and died in his cabin. He was buried there on the island, his grave facing south toward the pole. He tried for the pole the

first time, had to turn back with scurvy, tried again and fell short, tried to traverse across the whole continent but wound up stranded in the ice, went back a fourth time and died before he even left the ship. Now, in a way, you could say that Shackleton failed, that... everything he ever tried to achieve. But I'd prefer to say that he was a man who simply never took the hint, which is maybe the defining characteristic of all great men.

It's what makes them worth remembering. It's up to us to make sure that we always do. Once upon a time, there was a country. Not just a country, but a big one, an empire. In that empire, there was an upper middle class family where two boys were raised by their mother, loved books, Uncle Tom's cabin, in the Bible. Bible. Their father admired the country's leaders.

They were patriotic and happy. Both sons went to universities where they were radicalized. One of the brothers read a book and convinced him to try to shoot the country's leader. He was hanged. The other brother read the same books, they decided to lead a movement. First they came from the universities and no one seemed to care. Then they took over the unions. And again, no one seemed to care. Then they created their own media organizations and took over the cities.

And again, most people just ignored it. Change after all was something they could believe in until it was too late. Sound familiar? This is the real history of communism, the Russian Revolution.