Shackleton's Choice

By January of 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was frozen solid in the ice of the Weddell Sea. For months, he waited for the pack ice to break apart. It did not. In October, the ship groaned and finally splintered, and Shackleton watched his mission — a crossing of the Antarctic continent — sink beneath his boots.

At that moment, another commander might have blamed his crew, or his backers, or the weather. Shackleton did none of those things. He gathered his men on the ice and quietly reset the mission: no longer to cross Antarctica, but to bring every single person home alive. He wrote in his diary that night, 'The task is now to reach land with all the members of the Expedition.'

Over the next sixteen months, the crew hauled lifeboats across shifting ice floes, camped on drifting bergs, and eventually rowed for a hundred miles of open sea. Shackleton personally led a rescue party across mountains no European had ever crossed. When he finally arrived at a whaling station on South Georgia Island, he was unrecognizable — but not one man from the Endurance was missing.