The Men Who Watched for Shackleton

In April 1916, Ernest Shackleton left twenty-two men stranded on Elephant Island, a barren spit of rock off the Antarctic coast. He promised he would return with a rescue ship. Then he disappeared into eight hundred miles of the most violent ocean on earth in a twenty-two-foot lifeboat. The men had no radio. No way to know if Shackleton was alive or dead at the bottom of the Southern Ocean.…