A great leadership moment

Shackleton tells the story in South: Seeing Worsley taking a sun-sighting at noon, Shackleton "jumped into Worsley's boat in order to see the result. It was a grievous disappointment. Instead of making a good run to the westward we had made a big drift to the south-east. We were actually thirty miles to the east of the position we had occupied when we left the floe on the 9th. ... After a whispered consultation with Worsley and Wild I announced that we had not made as much progress as we expected, but I did not inform the hands of our retrograde movement."

Shackleton may have been thinking of this incident when he commented, “You often have to hide from them not only the truth, but your feelings about the truth. You may know that the facts are dead against you, but you mustn’t say so.”