That combination — competence, community, luck, and the refusal to surrender — is the closest thing to an explanation the story offers. It is also, given the circumstances, enough.
## After Shackleton
Ernest Shackleton spent the years between the Endurance return and his death on the Quest in 1921 in a combination of expedition planning, public lecturing, and the various financial difficulties that had plagued his career since the Nimrod expedition. He was not a good businessman. He was not a patient peace-time administrator. He was best when things were genuinely difficult, when the decisions required were hard and clear and the consequences were immediate.
The Quest expedition — his fourth and final Antarctic venture — was mounting an oceanographic survey of the subantarctic islands. It was smaller in scale and ambition than the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and it was organized more quickly and with less preparation than his best work warranted. He was 47 and not entirely well when it departed, but he had always been a man who found it easier to move than to stay.
He died of a heart attack in Grytviken harbor on January 5, 1922. His wife, Lady Emily Shackleton, responded to the question of where he should be buried by saying he should stay in the south — the place where he had always been most himself. He was buried at the Grytviken cemetery, under a stone that bears his name and the dates of his life and a line from Robert Browning that he had known in his youth: “I hold that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life’s set prize.”