Ernest Shackleton

Ernest Shackleton left school at 16 to go to sea and never reached the South Pole, the goal he chased for most of his adult life. His reputation rests instead on what happened when things went wrong.

In 1914 he set out to cross Antarctica on foot. His ship, the Endurance, became trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea before the party had even landed. The crew lived on the ship for ten months as the ice drifted, then watched it crushed and sunk. Twenty-eight men were left camping on floating ice with three small lifeboats.

Shackleton's goal changed at once from the crossing to something simpler: everyone goes home. When the ice broke up he got the men into the boats and reached Elephant Island, a bare rock nobody had ever visited. From there he and five others sailed a 22-foot open boat 800 miles across the roughest ocean on earth to South Georgia, a feat of navigation that is still hard to believe. Landing on the wrong side of the island, they crossed its unmapped mountains in 36 hours with a carpenter's adze and a length of rope.

It took four attempts and three months to get a ship back through the ice to Elephant Island. All 22 men waiting there were alive. Shackleton was not a great planner, but in a crisis he watched morale obsessively, shared every hardship, and made his men believe he would come back. He died of a heart attack in 1922 on his way south again.