Ernest Shackleton

Ernest Shackleton: The Man Who Failed and Brought Everyone Home

In January 1909 Shackleton stood at 88°23′ South, fewer than a hundred miles from the South Pole and closer than any human being had ever been. He calculated the food remaining, worked out that reaching the Pole would kill his party on the way back, and turned round. It is the decision on which his reputation rests — not a triumph but a refusal, and the clearest evidence of the quality that later saved twenty-eight lives in the Weddell Sea.

Dulwich and the Merchant Navy

He was born in 1874 in County Kildare, Ireland, and moved to London with his family at ten, where he was sent to Dulwich College and showed almost no interest in it. At sixteen he joined the merchant navy. He qualified as a master mariner in 1898 — a working seaman's credential rather than a naval commission, and the difference in background between Shackleton and the Royal Navy officers he would spend his life among is not incidental to the story.

Discovery, and Being Sent Home

Connections with the Longstaff family got him a berth as third officer on Robert Falcon Scott's British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901. In December 1902 Scott, Edward Wilson and Shackleton sledged to 82°17′ South, a new farthest south. Shackleton edited the expedition magazine. He also broke down physically, and Scott judged him unfit to continue and sent him home early.

Being invalided out of another man's expedition is an unpromising start to a polar career. It seems to have functioned as fuel.

Nimrod

In 1907 he returned with his own expedition, funded largely by the industrialist William Beardmore. The *Nimrod* party achieved a great deal: the first ascent of Mount Erebus, the first attainment of the South Magnetic Pole, and Shackleton's own march to 88°23′ South, within a hundred miles of the geographic Pole before the arithmetic of the ration bags forced him back. He returned to a hero's welcome and a knighthood.

Endurance, Crushed

The plan for 1914 was the crossing of the entire Antarctic continent, from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. It never began. *Endurance* was locked in the Weddell Sea pack ice on 19 January 1915, before her stores could be landed, and was slowly crushed over nine months, finally sinking on 27 October. Twenty-eight men were left on the ice with three boats.

They camped on floes as the ice drifted, then took to the boats and reached Elephant Island — uninhabited, off every shipping route, and a place where no one would ever come looking for them.

The James Caird

Shackleton's response was to leave. He took five men — Frank Worsley, Tom Crean, the carpenter Harry McNish, John Vincent and Timothy McCarthy — and set out for the whaling stations of South Georgia, some 800 statute miles across the Drake Passage in a 22-and-a-half-foot open whaleboat.

McNish had made the boat barely survivable first: he raised the sides by eight to ten inches with salvaged wood, decked her over with wood and canvas, sealed the work with oil paint, lamp wick and seal blood, ran a spare mast along the keel as a spine against the seas, rigged her as a ketch, and loaded a ton of beach stones as ballast so she would not capsize.

They left on 24 April 1916. Force 9 winds arrived within a day. The Cape Horn rollers ran up to sixty feet from trough to crest; frozen spray had to be chipped off before it rolled the boat over; the bailing never stopped. On 5 May, in the worst of it, Shackleton wrote that the boat was "lifted and flung forward like a cork in breaking surf."

Worsley navigated by four brief sextant sightings of the sun in seventeen days, taken from a boat that would not hold still, and called it "a merry jest of guesswork." He found South Georgia anyway. They sighted it on 8 May and landed at Cave Cove in King Haakon Bay on the 10th.

They had come ashore on the wrong side. Leaving Vincent and McNish under the upturned boat, Shackleton crossed the island's uncharted interior with Worsley and Crean — mountains and glaciers, no map, thirty-six hours of continuous marching — and walked into the whaling station at Stromness on 19 May, described by those who saw them as a terrible trio of scarecrows. It was the first confirmed crossing of South Georgia.

Getting back to Elephant Island took him three more months and four attempts against winter ice. The Chilean steam tug *Yelcho*, commanded by Luis Pardo, finally took the men off at the end of August 1916 and landed them at Punta Arenas on 3 September. Not one of the party on the island had died.

Why Ernest Is Called a Genius

The claim is not about intellect, nor really about physical craft. It concerns judgement about people, and about when to stop.

The stopping is the rarer half. At 88°23′ Shackleton had the prize within a week's march and abandoned it because the numbers said the return would kill his men. Almost nobody who has spent years and a fortune reaching that point performs that calculation honestly; polar history is largely a record of people who could not. The same faculty ran the Weddell Sea catastrophe: he abandoned the crossing, then the ship, then the camp, then the island, revising the objective downward until it was simply that everyone lived.

The people half was attested by the men, who credited their survival to his leadership. It consisted of allocating jobs so nobody had nothing to do, keeping malcontents close, and being visibly certain in public while doing arithmetic in private.

The counter-case is severe. Shackleton failed at every objective he announced. He did not reach the Pole. He did not cross Antarctica. *Endurance* sank before a single crate came off her, and the escape he is celebrated for was an escape from a disaster of his own leading. The two most technically astonishing acts of that escape were not his: the navigation was Worsley's, the boat McNish's. His were the decision to go, the choice of who went, and the refusal to accept the arithmetic of Elephant Island as final. That is real and unusual. It is not the same as brilliance.

Legacy

He went south once more, on the Shackleton–Rowett expedition, and died of a heart attack aboard the *Quest* at Grytviken, South Georgia, on 5 January 1922, aged forty-seven — at the whaling settlement his greatest journey had been aimed at six years earlier.

His standing has risen as Scott's fell: a 2002 poll of the hundred greatest Britons placed Shackleton eleventh and Scott fifty-fourth, a reversal of the verdict of 1913. The voyage of the *James Caird* is routinely described by historians as the greatest small-boat journey ever completed — an assessment earned, in the end, by a man who got everything he set out to do wrong and got every one of his people back.

Achievements

• Officer of the Order of the British Empire
• Officer of the Legion of Honour
• Knight of the Order of the Polar Star
• Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog
• Recorded as explorer, military officer and traveler