The formal recognition of this achievement in the navigational literature has been substantial: the James Caird voyage is taught as an example in some maritime navigation courses. What it required was not luck, or not primarily luck. It required the integration of enormous technical knowledge with continuous physical endurance, in conditions designed to defeat both.
Shackleton acknowledged this explicitly, and the acknowledgment is notable in a man who was not, by the accounts of those who served with him, inclined to distribute credit liberally. He said the navigation was Worsley’s, and that without Worsley’s navigation the crossing would not have succeeded. He was right.
## The Dogs
The expedition took 69 sled dogs to Antarctica, in the expectation of using them to cross the continent.
The dogs are part of the story in ways that are both practical and difficult. They were essential to the original plan: the crossing would have required dog teams to haul supplies from the Weddell Sea coast to the South Pole and beyond, and the dog teams on the Ross Sea side were supposed to lay the food depots that Shackleton’s men would need on the homeward leg. When the ship became beset and the crossing plan collapsed, the dogs became, in the first instance, companions and morale supports during the long drift on the ice.
They also became a problem. Dogs eat. They eat a great deal, relative to their weight, and feeding 69 dogs through a winter and spring on the Weddell Sea pack ice required a substantial fraction of the expedition’s food supply. As the situation became more serious and weight restrictions became critical, the dogs’ status changed.