You Call That Surviving?

The new season of “Survivor” is about to start, and unlike the rest of the world, I missed every single episode of the original version. But I have an alibi. I was stranded on an ice floe off Antarctica with two-dozen sailors and scientists. I was shipwrecked on a desert island, forced to drink turtle blood to keep from dying of thirst. “Survivor?” Whatever. I was too busy to watch TV. I was discovering the subgenre of Survival Literature, true tales too fantastic to believe, whose subtext needles you: “How would you fare?”

My obsession began in a little bookstore in Juneau, where I found a copy of Alfred Lansing’s “Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage.” “Incredible” is almost an understatement for history’s most exciting true adventure story. In 1914, 28 men, led by the famous polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, sailed for Antarctica in the strongest wooden boat ever built. They planned to cross the continent, but pack ice grabbed the Endurance just a day’s sail from the coast, held it for months in its grip, then crushed it like a car on the 110 flattens a Tecate can. Shackleton’s men spent almost two years lost off Antarctica. They camped in thin fabric tents on melting ice floes after the ice crushed their ship. In leaking lifeboats, beaten by sleet, rain, and snow, they sailed three days to godforsaken Elephant Island. Realizing they’d never be found, Shackleton took five men in one of the lifeboats on what is widely considered to be the most difficult boat journey ever completed: 800 miles across the Drake Passage, a stretch of ocean even the skippers of today’s new super-catamarans fear, knowing it could kill them despite their high-tech gear and 125-foot boats. Shackleton was in a 22-foot open lifeboat.

“At midnight I was at the tiller and suddenly noticed a line of clear sky between the south and south-west,” Shackleton writes in his memoir “South.” “I called to the other men that the sky was clearing, and then a moment later I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds but the white crest of an enormous wave.”

An identifying trait of Survival Lit is context. The author frequently steps back to assess the situation from the modern point of view. At this point in his retelling of the story, Alfred Lansing takes a little coffee break to tell us that Shackleton and his men were up the creek without a paddle. First he assesses the winds, quoting the U.S. Navy’s “Sailing Direction (sic) for Antarctica:”

“They are often of hurricane intensity and with gust velocities sometimes attaining 150 to 200 miles per hour. Winds of such violence are not known elsewhere, save perhaps within a tropical cyclone.”

Then, the waves: “called Cape Horn Rollers or ‘graybeards.’ Their length has been estimated from crest to crest to exceed a mile, and the terrified reports of some mariners have placed their height at 200 feet, though scientists doubt that they very often exceed 80 or 90 feet.”

Charles Darwin, on first seeing these waves breaking on Tierra del Fuego in 1833, wrote in his diary: “The sight . . . is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril and shipwreck.”

Of course, Shackleton and his men make it, and even rescue the men left behind. But in the great paradox of Survival Lit, at every dangerous point in the story of the Endurance, you expect your heroes to die; and even when you know they’re still months from rescue, you pray their latest futile effort will save them. The genre encourages you to indulge both your most fatalistic and hopeful fantasies. (Not to be a spoilsport, but nobody honestly believed survival was ever really an issue on “Survivor,” did they? Watching the show was about seeing how office politics played themselves out.)

In the process of making a radio documentary about Shackleton’s Endurance voyage, I discovered more stories of man versus the elements than I dreamed existed, like the sperm whale that rammed and sank a Nantucket whaling ship to become the inspiration for “Moby Dick”; or the tale of the nameless Dutch sailor kicked off his ship for being a homosexual--whose diary they found next to his skeleton; or the tale of Pedro de Serrano in the South Pacific.

It’s 1540, and a Spaniard is washed up on the shore of a desert island. He has only the clothes on his back, a knife in his belt, turtles for food, and their shells to collect drinking water. Three years pass. Pedro de Serrano’s clothes disintegrate, his beard grows to his knees, and hair sprouts all over his sunburned body. He’s a mess, but quite alive. Then, amazingly, another castaway arrives, only Serrano is such a sight, the newcomer thinks Serrano’s the devil. And vice versa. The two chase each other in circles around the little island, using Bible quotes to convince the other that they are not Satan.

The two live together for four more years (although for part of that time they live separately because of a petty feud). When a boat finally arrives, of course they both look like devils, and almost fail to convince the sailors to rescue them. Back in Europe, Serrano kept his beard so he’d appear more realistic when he exhibited himself. He made lots of money, and boarded a ship to Peru. He died off the coast of Panama.

Serrano’s story is included in “Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls,” a compilation of retellings by Edward Leslie. In his introduction, Leslie says he wants to know what psychological changes the survivor undergoes while in solitude and what lasting effects he experiences after rescue. But I’m more interested in a point Leslie raises by prefacing the whole book with a quote by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe: “I am most entertained by those actions which give me a light into the nature of man.”

Surely, Defoe can’t mean the nature of other men only and not himself. Part of the fun--and part of the danger--of Survival Lit is that even as your jaw drops reading what other people live through (or don’t), you put yourself in their shoes. If I were with Shackleton, would I, as the British sailors put it, “Grin and bear it. Growl and go?” Or would I crumple up and die, as doubtless many castaways did? Would I be worthy of a story retold even centuries later? Will I ever do something so romantic and difficult, or will I stay in my house and watch TV because I don’t like all that traffic and parallel parking.

I’m probably going to miss the new “Survivor” as well, but I have a much better excuse this time. I’m preparing a trip to Central Africa, to battle lions, hippos, or--more likely--intestinal parasites in the jungles of Gabon. Eighteen-hour plane rides, bush taxis, pirogues down the Ogooue to Samba Falls. And who can say? After three weeks of something finally approaching real survival, maybe I’ll be happy to give up Shackleton and settle in to watch reruns of “Survivor.”

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* John Rabe is KPCC-FM (89.3) host of All Things Considered weekdays 3-6:30 p.m. His documentary on Ernest Shackleton’s voyage, “Walking Out of History,” is at www.npr.org.