The ship entered the pack and began threading its way south. Progress was made in leads, lost when leads closed, regained when new ones opened. The officers took turns on watch, scanning the ice ahead for navigable water. McNish and the other carpenters stood by for hull repairs from ice strikes. The dogs barked from their deck kennels. Hurley photographed.
On January 18, 1915, the leads that had been carrying them south closed simultaneously. There was nowhere to move. The ice locked around the hull in every direction, and the Endurance stopped.
One day’s sail from their destination. One day.
The ice that had looked like an obstacle course on their way in had become, without any single dramatic event, a prison. The ship was not damaged. The hull was intact. The engines could run, but there was nothing for them to push against — the ice was solid in every direction. They were beset.
The drift that began then would carry them 1,186 miles over the next nine months, north and then northeast, away from the continent and eventually toward the breakup that launched the boats. The mathematics of the drift — how fast the ice moved, where it would carry them, when it would release them — were beyond any human control or prediction. Shackleton could make decisions about what to do when conditions changed, but he could not make conditions change. All he could do was keep 28 men coherent and functional through an extended period of uncertainty.
He did this with tools that are available to any manager of human beings: routine, fairness, humor, attention to individual welfare, and the willingness to make decisions visibly and explain them. The routine of the ship — meals at fixed times, duties assigned and completed, recreation organized — imposed a framework on days that were otherwise shapeless. The Antarctic winter, when it came, brought twenty-four-hour darkness; without artificial structure, the days would have blurred into each other in a way that is psychologically dangerous. Shackleton did not allow the blurring.