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By Root 841 0

both lowly able seamen but avid readers, could look forward to discussing the books they had read in the excellent ship's library one-on-one with Sir Ernest Shackleton. Blackborow, the stowaway, was made to attend to his schooling, Sir Ernest having taken a personal interest in the bright, conscientious young man. Yet when occasion required, Shackleton's commanding personality could also confront the most difficult individuals head on. John Vincent, the bosun, a swaggering trawlerhand who was physically bigger and stronger than any of the rest of the crew, was a bully. When a delegation from the fo'c'sle complained to Shackleton of ill treatment at his hands, the Boss summoned Vincent to his cabin. Vincent left shaken and demoted, and caused no more specific trouble. Shackleton had not felt the need for backup in this encounter, which in the hands of lesser men could have turned into an unpleasantly jittery affair.

“He could put on a look, a disdainful look that made you shrivel up,” according to First Officer Lionel Greenstreet. “He could be very cutting when he wanted to, but I think it was more the look.”

Above all else, Shackleton judged a man by the degree of optimism he projected. “Optimism,” Shackleton once said, “is true moral courage.” Those not blessed with this gift he regarded with transparent contempt. This was the case with poor Lees, who was probably the most universally unpopular member of the expedition on account of his snobbishness and his inclination to be absent when hard work was demanded. For Shackleton, however, these flaws mattered less than Lees's naked anxiety about supplies and provisions. Lees had been appointed storekeeper and was in charge of rationing and keeping tally of what was consumed; but his able fulfillment of these duties was marred by his tendency to hoard and secret away trivial odds and ends for his own personal use. This, to Shackleton, suggested morbid pessimism, a lack of faith in availability of future stores. And so, despite Lees's own reverence for Shackleton as a leader, he was despised.

Characteristically, however, Shackleton was not vindictive. When, later in the winter, Lees was laid up with a bad back after shovelling snow (“the first work he has done since we left London,” McNish sourly observed), Shackleton placed him in his own cabin, checking in on him from time to time and bringing him cups of tea.

“At first,” wrote Lees plaintively, “I was in my own bunk lying in indifference & almost complete darkness all day. …” These are the words of a lonely man. One has the distinct feeling that Shackleton sensed some less observable malaise behind Lees's symptoms, and that he whisked Lees away from self-pity and the needling of his skeptical shipmates for a little ego boosting—all for a man he actively disliked.

R. W. James

“James was physicist, and was engaged in working magnetic observations, occultations of stars. … He had some wonderful electrical machines which none of us understood, and a joke of ours that annoyed him very much, was that he did not either.” (Macklin, diary)

Another pillar of the high morale on board Endurance was Frank Wild, Shackleton's second-in-command. No man had a bad word to say about him. “He has,” wrote Lees, “rare tact and the happy knack of saying nothing and yet getting people to do things just as he requires them.… [I]f he has any orders to give us he gives them in the nicest way.” Wild was forty, the same age as Shackleton. He was born in Yorkshire, the son of a schoolteacher, and claimed, untruly, that he was a direct descendant of the great Captain Cook. Before his first journey south on the Discovery, Wild had served in both the merchant service and the navy. He later declined Scott's invitation to join the Terra Nova expedition, casting his lot instead with Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Wild had a laid-back competence, an unassuming manner, and it was to him that most petty complaints were made—that Clark, the biologist, wasn't polite enough, that Marston was a bully. To each grievance Wild appeared to give