Worsley, F(rank) A(rthur) 1872-1943

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WORSLEY, F(rank) A(rthur) 1872-1943

PERSONAL:

Born 1872, in Akaroa, New Zealand; died February 1, 1943.

CAREER:

Explorer, navigator, and ship's captain. Military service: Commander, Royal Navy Reserve; ship captain for Ernest Shackleton on two polar expeditions.

WRITINGS:

Under Sail in the Frozen North, S. Paul and Co. Ltd. (London, England), 1927.

Endurance: An Epic Polar Adventure, P. Allan and Co. (London, England), 1931, Norton (New York, NY), 1999.

The Romance of Lloyd's: From Coffee-house to Palace, Hutchinson and Co. (London, England), 1932, Hillman-Curl (New York, NY), 1936.

First Voyage in a Square-rigged Ship, G. Bles (London, England), 1938.

The Great Antarctic Rescue: Shackleton's Boat Journey, introduction by Sir Edmund Hillary, Times Books (London, England), 1977, published as Shackleton's Boat Journey, Norton (New York, NY), 1977.

SIDELIGHTS:

Born in 1872 during a time when the world's geographical extremes had still only been explored in a limited way, F. A. Worsley grew up to be a polar explorer and ship captain for Sir Ernest Shackleton on two expeditions to Antarctica. He was the joint leader of the British Arctic Expedition of 1925 as well as a commander in the Royal Navy Reserve.

Worsley first wrote of his polar excursions in Under the Sail in the Frozen North in 1927. In this volume he recounts the sixteen-day journey of the ship the James Caird to South Georgia under the navigation of Worsley, and the crew's rescue of people marooned on Elephant Island. In 1938 Worsley wrote First Voyage in a Square-rigged Ship.

Worsley is best known for his books Shackleton's Boat Journey and Endurance: An Epic Polar Adventure, both of which provide his account of the heroic and ill-fated transarctic expedition to the Weddell Sea from 1914 to 1916. Alfred Stephenson, a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement called Shackleton's Boat Journey an account of "extraordinary hardship borne with unbelievable stoicism, as well as a thrilling story of the sea, and it is told with considerable descriptive ability and humor." Margery Fisher, a reviewer in Growing Point, described the book as "the book of a sailor, full of practical descriptions of storm, navigation, weather, but it is also the narrative of an incurable optimist and a shrewd student of human nature." Albert H. Johnston in Publishers Weekly, called the story one of the "world's great adventures," and "a stunning story of survival told by a captain who watched his ship's slow icy death in the Antarctic." A reviewer in the New Yorker was impressed with the way Worsley draws the reader's attention to such vivid details that they can "feel to [their] marrow the sub-zero cold, the endless soaking wet, the hunger and thirst, the stink and misery, the winds that ranged from gale to hurricane, the constant danger that the party endured before all hands were rescued."