Ernest Shackleton

Shackleton set out in 1914 to cross Antarctica on foot. His ship Endurance was caught in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea before he could land, drifted trapped for ten months, and was crushed and sank. The party camped on floes for another five months, then took three small boats to the uninhabited Elephant Island. From there Shackleton and five men sailed a seven-metre open boat thirteen hundred kilometres across the South Atlantic to South Georgia, navigating by four sextant readings in sixteen days, then crossed the island's unmapped mountains on foot in thirty-six hours to reach a whaling station.

It took four attempts and three and a half months to get a ship back through the ice to Elephant Island. Every one of the twenty-eight men survived. The expedition achieved none of its stated goals and is remembered instead as the standard against which the management of a disaster is measured. Shackleton died of a heart attack at forty-seven aboard ship at South Georgia, on his way to yet another expedition. His wife asked that he be buried there rather than brought home, and he lies in the whalers' cemetery at Grytviken, facing south.