This is the full-title edition of Lansing's reconstruction of Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The ship Endurance was trapped in the Weddell Sea pack ice, drifted for ten months, was crushed and sank, and the twenty-eight men survived a further year on ice floes and on Elephant Island before rescue. Nobody died. Lansing interviewed survivors and used their diaries, which is why the account carries detail no later reconstruction could match.
The leadership material is why the book is read outside the adventure category. Shackleton abandoned the expedition's original objective immediately once the ship was lost and redefined success as bringing everyone home. He managed group cohesion deliberately, assigning tent placements to separate potential sources of dissent and keeping the men he considered difficult close to himself. He maintained routines including regular meals, work assignments and organised recreation throughout, and enforced equality of rations and labour regardless of rank.
The operational sequence includes the failed sledging attempts across the ice, the retreat to the boats, the passage to Elephant Island, and the eight hundred mile open boat journey to South Georgia followed by the first crossing of that island's interior.
Lansing wrote in 1959 and the book is narrative rather than analysis, so the reader must extract the leadership material. The situation differs from any commercial one, particularly in that the men could not leave. The immediate abandonment of the original objective when it became impossible is the element with the widest application.
Leaders holding a group together through a prolonged period with no progress and no original objective left to pursue.
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