Twenty-Eight and Three

His greatness and his recklessness were one faculty, not two. At Grytviken the Norwegian whalers who worked that water told Ernest Shackleton the Weddell pack was the worst in their memory and he should wait a year. He sailed on 5 December 1914. Six weeks later Endurance was beset, one day's sail short of the coast she was aiming for, and never moved again. He could not afford to wait, so he did not wait.

Twenty-eight men came off Elephant Island alive, and that is the sentence the whole reputation rests on. On the far side of the continent, in the same expedition, three men died laying depots for a crossing that had already become impossible, on a budget Shackleton had personally halved, from two thousand pounds to one thousand, telling Aeneas Mackintosh to find the rest himself. Arnold Spencer-Smith died of exhaustion and scurvy while being hauled on a sledge. Mackintosh and Victor Hayward walked onto thin sea ice in May 1916 and were never seen again. Twenty-eight and three is the count this book keeps.

Twelve of the twenty-two chapters come before Endurance sails, because the rescue is only intelligible as the third attempt at a retreat he had been practising his whole life: Dulwich, the troopship where he talked his way aboard Discovery, and 88°23'S, ninety-seven nautical miles from the Pole with a month's food and twice that distance to walk back. The version taught in business schools begins with the ship already in the ice. The nine months beset, the James Caird and the crossing of unmapped South Georgia are built from the diaries five men kept inside the same ship, and where they differ it shows the difference rather than assembling a composite. It is equally plain about what cannot be documented: the famous recruitment advertisement has never been found and is treated here as an invention. Endurance was located in 2022, about four nautical miles from the position Frank Worsley had written in the log without a sight. Quest was found in 2024.