SH01 MY COUSIN ERNEST

• Published in: ANZ Journal of Surgery
• Main Author: Arnot, R. S.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2007
• Subjects: Antarctic; Shackleton; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1445-2197.2007.04130_1.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1445-2197.2007.04130_1.x; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1445-2197.2007.04130_1.x

My cousin Ernest was born into an Anglo‐Irish Protestant family on 15 February 1874. My Quaker grandmother was his second cousin. Shackleton did not follow his father into medicine, but went to sea at the age of 16, and accompanied Scott to the Antarctic on the Discovery expedition in 1902. He went on to lead three Antarctic expeditions, and has been hailed as one of the world’s greatest leaders. In all his travels he is acclaimed as never having lost a man, and a fellow explorer once said of him –‘for a dash to the Pole give me Amundsen, but if I am in a devil of a hole and want to get out, give me Shackleton every time’. Recently his techniques of leadership have become widely disseminated in business, the military and many other walks of life and have been described as ‘Shackleton’s Way’. And yet paradoxically, Shackleton never led a group larger than 27 and he failed to reach nearly every goal he ever set. I will also discuss the Endurance expedition of 1914–16, which is one of the most spectacular disasters of all time.