The Explorer Who Lost None

In April 1916, Ernest Shackleton stood on the shore of Elephant Island and made a promise to twenty-two men he was leaving behind. Their ship, the Endurance, had been crushed by Antarctic ice months earlier. Now stranded on a desolate, wind-blasted spit of rock, the crew watched as Shackleton climbed into a twenty-two-foot lifeboat to cross eight hundred miles of the most treacherous ocean on earth — the Drake Passage — to find rescue.…