Title: Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
 
Author: Alfred Lansing
 
Backstory:
Morgan Stanley’s John Mack was so drawn to the survival story of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton that he helped raise money to make a film about it, earning an executive producer credit to go along with the C.E.O. title on his résumé. Now, Shackleton is such a trendy figure in the business world that several books have been published about his leadership style, including Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons From the Great Antarctic Explorer (2002).

Total reading time: 380 minutes
 
First published: 1959

Key passages:
“It was inescapable. He was the Boss. There was always a barrier, an aloofness, which kept him apart. It was not a calculated thing: He was simply emotionally incapable of forgetting—even for an instant—his position and the responsibility it entailed. The others might rest, or find escape by the device of living for the moment. But for Shackleton there was little rest and no escape. The responsibility was entirely his, and a man could not be in his presence without feeling this.”

“Cheeks were drained and white, eyes were bloodshot from the salt spray and the fact that the men had slept only once in the past four days. Matted beards had caught the snow and frozen into a mass of white. Shackleton searched their faces for an answer to the question that troubled him most: How much more could they take?”

“ ‘For scientific leadership give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, where there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.’ ”

Synopsis:
The book recounts the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated attempt to cross the last uncharted continent on dogsleds, an odyssey that some have called the greatest Antarctic adventure of all time. In 1914, just as World War I began, Shackleton and his crew of 27 set out from England for Antarctica on a ship called the Endurance. They never even reached the continent. For more than a month, they fought through thousands of miles of pack ice in the Weddell Sea. Then the pack froze around their ship, locking them into a huge floe. For 10 months, the ship drifted northwest until the pressure of ice floes finally crushed it.

In the following months, Shackleton and his crew subsisted on seal blubber, penguins, and dog meat, moving from ice floe to ever-shrinking ice floe. Ultimately they set out in open 22-foot boats across some of the most frigid, treacherous waters on earth. Crew members’ diaries provide a fascinating, detail-laden account of the expedition. To get his men through it, Shackleton was “intensely watchful for potential troublemakers who might nibble away at the unity of the group.” He complimented those who needed flattery and even went so far as to assign potential malcontents, as well as the most irritating and self-centered individuals, to his own tent so their negativity would not rub off on others.

Through it all, Shackleton insisted that everyone be treated the same, and he endured the same privations as his men. He went out of his way to participate in menial chores, including spending hours teaching them to play bridge. Shackleton considered reticence and delay as threats to survival and continually pushed his crew to persevere. He braved the feared Drake Passage—the roughest patch of sea in the world—and in the end, every member of the crew survived.