He has been called “the greatest leader that ever came on God’s earth, bar none,” yet he never led a group larger than 27, he failed to reach nearly every goal he ever set and, until recently, he had been little remembered since his death in 1922. But once you learn the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton and his remarkable Antarctic expedition of 1914 you’ll come to agree with the effusive praise of those under his command. He is a model of great leadership and, in particular, a master of guidance in crisis.

That’s because Shackleton failed only at the improbable; he succeeded at the unimaginable. “I love the fight and when things [are] easy, I hate it,” he once wrote to his wife, Emily. He failed to reach the South Pole in 1902, when he was part of a three-man Farthest South team on the Discovery expedition of the great explorer Captain Robert F. Scott. But the men turned back only after walking their scurvy-ravaged bodies to within 463 miles of the Pole in a terrifying cold experienced only by a handful of human beings at that time. Six years later, commanding his own expedition aboard the Nimrod, Shackleton was forced to stop a heartbreaking 97 miles short of the Pole, but only after realizing it would be certain death by starvation had his team continued. He was forgiven that failure in light of the greatness of the effort; he was knighted by King Edward VII and honored as a hero throughout the world.

His greatest failure was his 1914-1916 Endurance expedition. He lost his ship before even touching Antarctica. But he reached a new pinnacle in leadership when he successfully led all 27 members of his crew to safety after a harrowing two-year fight for their lives.