Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

“They took the forty-nine huskies from their kennels and slid each one down to other men waiting below […] [n]ot one fight broke out among them, and not a single dog attempted to break away.”

Lansing depicts the Endurance crewmembers as extraordinary on every level. Adventurous, resourceful, and capable of imposing order upon chaos, they were actually relieved to be ordered to abandon their ship, as it was being crushed by ice. In order to evacuate the critically important sled dogs, which would be used to draw their sleds over icy Antarctic terrain, the men devised a makeshift canvas chute from the ship down to the ice below. The author implies that the level-headed calm displayed by the crew actually influenced the behavior of the animals.

“But the great leaders of historical record—the Napoleons, the Nelsons, the Alexanders—have rarely fitted any conventional mold, and it is perhaps an injustice to evaluate them in ordinary terms.”

Shackleton was somewhat capricious in his goals and interests. While highly charismatic, fiercely devoted to his crew, and deeply driven to succeed, he did not ascribe to the military conformity of thought and adherence to procedure that one might expect of a leader in this situation. Lansing, however, suggests that this nonconformity is itself a characteristic of leadership, alluding to several historical individuals who functioned in lofty leadership roles but were ill-suited to conventional measures of judgment and responsibility.

“He was, after all, an explorer in the classic mold—utterly self-reliant, romantic, and just a little swashbuckling.”

Shackleton had a somewhat sordid financial past. At various times, he was involved with schemes to “manufacture cigarettes […], a fleet of taxicabs, mining in Bulgaria […] [and] even dig[] for buried treasure” (15).