When you're in adversity and you don't see a way out...

“For scientific discovery, give me Scott;

for speed and efficiency of travel, give me Amundsen;

but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone,

get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”

-       Sir Raymond Priestly

What makes a commander great?

What puts him in that place of honor destined for but a few?

Is it a question of what he achieves?

Does it depend on how many people he leads?

Or are there other ways to achieve excellence when commanding an enterprise?

The reason I ask is because Ernest Shackleton did not achieve any of the ambitious goals he set for himself, and never commanded more than a few dozen men. Yet in addition to the statement you read above from Priestley – geologist, geographer, explorer, president of the Royal Geographical Society, and who served under Shackleton’s command – Shackleton was "the greatest leader that ever came on God's earth, bar none."

Captain Shackleton was the protagonist of the most incredible and fantastic rescue story of all time, in which he showed extraordinary courage and valor, judicious action, and unshakable determination, all combined with wisdom seasoned by experience.

As for the people on their knees praying that God would send him, they truly existed: 22 members of his crew whose only hope for salvation was the success of their commander's plan. Stranded on Elephant Island near Antarctica following the loss of their ship, Endurance, the men waited as their commander attempted a perilous voyage in an open lifeboat to bring rescuers. Lashed by the polar climate, Elephant Island does not sustain any native flora or fauna, and is visited only certain times of year by migratory penguins and seals. The island remains uninhabited today due to the conditions, the dangers of the sea around it, and the lack of a port. The men’s only hope was Shackleton.

Let's go back to the beginning of this incredible adventure, considered the last great expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, and to why it will be remembered forever.

Shackleton himself writes in the introduction to "South!”, the book in which he collected the transcripts of his notes:

"After the conquest of the South Pole by Amundsen who, for a few days, had preceded Scott's British expedition, only one great feat of Antarctic exploration remained: the crossing of the White Continent from sea to sea."

And so Shackleton began raising funds to organize a mission that would allow a group of Britons – starting in London – to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea (Atlantic Ocean) to the Ross Sea (Pacific Ocean), via the Pole. The Endurance Expedition, also known as the Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition of 1914, was to be a trans-continental voyage of over 3000 kilometres by sailboat and sled.

Endurance would be the first mission to Antarctica organized by the United Kingdom after Roald Amundsen (Norwegian) beat Robert Falcon Scott (English) in the race to the Pole in December, 1911. Scott's defeat and tragic end – he lost his life along with members of his expedition on the march back to base camp – had been a major setback for the United Kingdom, which had sent three expeditions in the previous decade in an attempt to be the first country to reach the South Pole.

The roots of such a challenge went even further back for Shackleton, who declared:

"It seemed to me that I had made a vow with myself that one day I would go to the ice and snow region, and go on and on until I reached one of the Earth's poles, the end of the axis on which this great sphere rotates."

An unconventional quest called for an unconventional recruiting process. Consider Shackleton's job posting for the expedition:

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”

This daunting announcement was published on January 1, 1914. 5000 people showed up.

Shackleton's methods of interviewing and selecting people were also original and unique. Believing that character and temperament were as important as technical skills for the mission, he asked unconventional questions. For example, physicist Reginald James was bewildered when asked if he could sing. Others were accepted on the basis of a quick glance from the captain, and others after the answer to one simple question.

Shackleton was looking for people who could work free of the traditional hierarchy, expecting every man, including scientists, to do the necessary tasks, no matter how tiring and humble. A total of 56 men were selected, 28 for the ship that was to carry them, and 28 for the ship that was to pick them up. The expedition also called for 70 dogs.

You had 28 hard, strong, and certainly half-crazy, men in search of unique experiences, impossible to achieve in any other way. Among them were Frank Worsley, two doctors, the ship's captain, a biologist, a physicist, a weatherman, an artist draughtsman, and a photographer/cameraman, Frank Hurley, who managed to photograph and film the enterprise. The photos of the expedition that we have uploaded in the post are his.

We can sense Shackleton's wisdom and vision in choosing men who knew how to both have fun and enjoy themselves in order to avoid giving in to despair, as well as work on whatever task was necessary, from arranging supplies to cleaning the ship's deck. Today we might call that “resiliency”!

Although there is no evidence that the announcement was true, the atmosphere and the evocative power it conveys are not far from the truth, even as we remember that this took place on the eve of the First World War.

Endurance was the name given to the ship used for the voyage. It was a 3-masted sailing ship, also equipped with a single propeller driven by an engine which allowed an average speed of 10 knots (about 19 km/h). It was designed specifically for Arctic exploration. Its dimensions were 43.9 m long and 7.6 m wide for a tonnage of 320 tons. The two-year-old ship was purchased below cost by Shackleton in 1914 for £11,600.

The ship sailed from London on August 1, 1914, three days before England declared war on Germany, with Shackleton and his 27 other men on board. Endurance anchored in Grytvyken (South Georgia) for about a month and sailed again on December 5, 1914, reaching the Weddell Sea on January 10, 1915. On January 19, Shackleton wrote:

"Our position on the morning of the 19th was lat. 76° 34' S., long. 31° 30'W. The weather was good, but no advance could be made. The ice had closed around the ship during the night, and no water could be seen in any direction from the deck."

And here begins the adventure itself, Endurance immobilized and drifting in an immense block of ice that was transporting it north and west, ever further from their objective of the Luitpold Coast. Shackleton's hopes of starting the crossing the following season grew more and more remote every day.

On 1 May, 1915 the sun set one last time on the Antarctic: it was the beginning of the long southern winter. Shackleton writes:

“We said good-bye to the sun on May 1 and entered the period of twilight that would be followed by the darkness of midwinter. The sun by the aid of refraction just cleared the horizon at noon and set shortly before 2 p.m.”

The crushing grip of the ice squeezed the life out of the ship, rupturing its hull. The crew tried to pump out the water, but on October 27th – 281 days from the grounding - Shackleton gives the order to abandon the ship.

 “It is hard to write what I feel. To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home, and in the Endurance I had centred ambitions, hopes, and desires. Now, straining and groaning, her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career. She is crushed and abandoned after drifting more than 570 miles in a north-westerly direction during the 281 days since she became locked in the ice.”

The men prepared to camp on the ice in conditions where the outside temperatures were around -25°C, carrying dogs, supplies, and three lifeboats away from the Endurance. Two of the lifeboats, the Stancomb Willis and the Dudley Docker, were cutters (basically sailboats), and the third was the seven-meter long James Caird, a classic whaler. In the following weeks the men worked to save everything possible from the ship, including the photographs and photographic materials. In the meantime, the ship continued to be chewed by the violent pressure of the ice sheet until being swallowed on 15 November 1915, sinking at 69°00′S 51°30′W.

Once again, Shackleton's dreams of glory didn't come true. Bearing in mind what happened to Scott, Shackleton decided that the expedition wouldn't end, and dedicated himself to a new objective: thinking about how he could save the lives of his crew.

Shackleton had the crew transferred to an emergency camp called Ocean Camp where they remained until December 29th when they moved on, towing three lifeboats on an ice-slab of a quay to what they called Patience Camp.

There they stayed until 8 April 1916, when the quay began to melt. They tried to reach Elephant Island on the boats. After a very difficult navigation, they reached the coast of the island on April 15, 1916 (498th day of the expedition).

While their home was no longer in danger of melting from underneath them, the matter became even more serious: 28 men were lost in Antarctica, in a place not exactly suited for waiting for rescue while sipping an aperitif. The island is terribly inhospitable: most of the surface is covered with snow and ice, while the rest consists exclusively of rocks.

Despite the relative abundance of seals and penguins, the group feared that the migratory animals might go away, just as those near the camp on the recently abandoned mainland. The arrival of winter in the Southern Hemisphere was a further source of concern, as was the fact that they were far from where they had planned to explore, and far from the sea routes of the time, making it virtually impossible they’d be sighted by a random ship. A final complicating factor was that England was engaged in a war with all its might and might not spare resources to search for them.

Shackleton was faced with the difficult decision of what to do in such a situation, how could he save his 27 men from that inferno of ice?

He quickly understood it was essential to leave as soon as possible and, knowing the climate and winds of the area thanks to previous explorations, he didn't choose the nearest place, but the one he had the best chance to reach – even if that chance itself had a very low probability. He would make for a whaling base located in South Georgia, 870 nautical miles – more than 1,600 km – away. It was, in fact, the place they had set out from 522 days earlier. He chose five men to join him in seeking help, and they selected the lifeboat that was in the best condition, the seven-meter long James Caird.

They set sail on April 24, 1916 with the help of a sextant, a chronometer, hope – and all the audacity of Captain Shackleton.

The small boat, loaded with crackers and sandbags for ballast, set out into waters known for being among the stormiest in the world. The modern weather stations installed in that area today record winds of 60 to 70 km/h and waves of over seven metres for 200 days a year, while waves of more than 20 metres are not uncommon.

The voyage of the James Caird remains to this day one of the most daring sea voyages ever made. This is what Shackleton wrote about one of those waves the ship faced:

“At midnight I was at the tiller and suddenly noticed a line of clear sky between the south and south-west. 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. During twenty-six years’ experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic. It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days.

“I shouted, ‘For God’s sake, hold on! It’s got us!’

“Then came a moment of suspense that seemed drawn out into hours. White surged the foam of the breaking sea around us. We felt our boat lifted and flung forward like a cork in breaking surf. We were in a seething chaos of tortured water; but somehow the boat lived through it, half-full of water, sagging to the dead weight and shuddering under the blow. We baled with the energy of men fighting for life, flinging the water over the sides with every receptacle that came to our hands, and after ten minutes of uncertainty we felt the boat renew her life beneath us.”

On May 8, 1916, after 15 days of sailing, the crew, tired and thirsty, sighted some islands of South Georgia. Morale recovered but Shackleton, in order to avoid a landing at night on an unknown coast not yet charted, preferred to stop offshore and wait for the light. The problem was that after a few hours a violent storm broke out with winds similar to those of a hurricane. For nine very hard and dangerous hours the crew struggled not to be pushed against the rocks and finally landed on May 10 in the bay of King Haakon.

Shackleton wrote:

“However, I made fast the line, and in a few minutes we were all safe on the beach, with the boat floating in the surging water just off the shore. We heard a gurgling sound that was sweet music in our ears, and, peering around, found a stream of fresh water almost at our feet. A moment later we were down on our knees drinking the pure, ice-cold water in long draughts that put new life into us. It was a splendid moment.”

A small detail they soon realized: the whaling station they were to reach was on the opposite side of the island. So Shackleton, along with Tom Crean and Frank Worsley, walked another 36 hours to cross 30 miles of South Georgia's unexplored mountains and glaciers (it was the first crossing of the island!!!) to reach the Stromness whaling station on the north coast, arriving on May 20. (Imagine what these men, after all they had been through, would have looked like when they walked into Stromness!)

Meanwhile, time continued to pass for the 22 men still trapped in the ice of Elephant Island, under the command of Shackleton's second, Frank Wild. Shackleton wrote in his stories that before he set sail on the James Caird, the winds, which blew between 112 and 145 kilometres per hour, had torn the sails to shreds.

On Elephant Island temperatures are extremely cold and at night the thermometer reads -20°. The island has no natural shelter; not a cave, a rock, or anything. The stranded men built a rudimentary hut using the overturned hulls of the two remaining lifeboats as a roof. The remains of the sails were sewn together and used, together with the compacted snow, to try to isolate the shelter which shook with every violent blizzard that crashed down on the island.

In a testament to the character Shackleton had seen in them, they tried to keep each other's spirits up as evidenced by the following verses they composed in gratitude to Commander Wild, who remained on the island with the task of making sure as many men as possible survived for as long as possible:

“My name is Frankie Wild-o.

Me hut's on Elephant Isle.

The wall's without a single brick

and the roof's without a tile.

Nevertheless I must confess,

by many and many a mile,

it's the most palatial dwelling place

you'll find on Elephant Isle.

It's the most palatial dwelling place

You'll find on Elephant Isle.”

Meanwhile, having landed in South Georgia, safe and sound, Shackleton didn’t give the slightest thought to leaving his men to their fate. Ever more determined, he organized a rescue and ... unfortunately failed three times to reach the island because of the ice.

The situation grew worse by the day until the unlikely became a reality.

August 30, 1916 on Elephant Island. Latitude 61°01′S 54°54′W. Antarctica. Something moves on the horizon and some human beings feel immense joy:

"That's him. It's the commander. It's Shackleton!"

After 20 months of odyssey, and four months of waiting, the 22 survivors of the Endurance expedition rejoice.

They have never lost faith or hope.

They're safe now.

"He", their commander, had done it.

He'd come back for them.

On the fourth attempt Shackleton managed to return to Elephant Island with the Chilean ship Yelcho from Punta Arenas, Chile, commanded by Luis Pardo. Shackleton rescued the entire crew without losing any of his men:

We had “suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in his splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of men.”

-       Ernest Shackleton

And as for you, what would you be willing to do to understand your soul? And to save the people you love? To overcome the challenges you face?

Who would pray, on their knees, for God to send you?