Meet Shackleton: He Failed the Expedition and Saved Every Man

Sent home as an invalid

In 1903 Scott sent Shackleton home from the Discovery expedition as an invalid. The humiliation shaped everything that followed.

Six years later, on his own expedition, he got within ninety-seven miles of the South Pole and turned around, because the food would not have lasted the return. He told his wife afterwards that he thought she would rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.

Crushed before they started

The Endurance never reached the continent. She was trapped in Weddell Sea pack ice, held for months, and slowly crushed. The expedition's actual objective — the first land crossing of Antarctica — was over before it began.

What replaced it was a two-year problem of keeping twenty-eight men alive on ice floes, in open boats and on a barren island.

Morale rationed like food

He managed it deliberately. Football on the ice. A concert every fortnight. Every man taking a turn at every job, including the scientists scrubbing floors. When the ship went and everything non-essential had to be abandoned, he walked to the front, took out his gold cigarette case and a handful of gold coins, and threw them into the snow before asking anyone else to give anything up.

He also made the expedition photographer dive back into the sinking ship for his glass plates. That is why the photographs exist.

Eight hundred miles in a lifeboat

Five men sailed a converted twenty-two-foot lifeboat 800 miles across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia, navigated on four sextant sights in conditions that allowed no more. Then three of them crossed the island's unmapped mountains in thirty-six hours with screws driven through their boot soles for grip.

It took him four attempts over four months to get back to the men on Elephant Island. He got all of them.

The ledger the legend leaves out

While that was happening, the party laying his supply depots from the other side of the continent lost three men.

He was a poor businessman — mining, tobacco and shipping ventures all failed, and he was in debt most of his adult life. He died of a heart attack at forty-seven aboard ship at South Georgia, on his way south again. His widow asked that he be buried there rather than brought home.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when the plan is gone and the people are still your responsibility. He is the best case study there is in changing the objective without telling anyone the situation is hopeless.