Worsley thought not so much of dying, because that was now so plainly inevitable, but of the fact that no one would ever know how terribly close they had come.

sufficiently provoked, there is hardly a creature on God’s earth that ultimately won’t turn and attempt to fight, regardless of the odds.

And so that peculiar brand of anxiety, born of an impossible goal that somehow comes within reach, began to infect them. Nothing overt, really, just a sort of added awareness, a little more caution and more care to insure that nothing preventable should go wrong now.

As noon approached, the clouds started to thin out. Before long patches of blue sky appeared, and soon the sun was shining down. Worsley took out his sextant, and it was no task at all to get a sight. When he had worked it out, the fix put their position at 56°13´ South, 45°38´ West—403 miles from Elephant Island. They were just more than halfway

Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

If there were only some duties, useful or otherwise, to be performed, the burden of time would be more pleasant and at present our sole exercise is to promenade up and down the 80 yards of the spit, or climb to the lookout and scan the misty skyline for a mast.

On the rare occasions when he was ordered or shamed into taking up an oar, he managed to exhibit an ineptitude which won him a speedy relief.

But then came the swell—the physical proof that there really was something outside this limitless prison of ice. And all the defenses they had so carefully constructed to prevent hope from entering their minds collapsed.

“We also suffer from ‘Amenomania’” [literally—wind-madness], he wrote later. “This disease may be exhibited in two forms: Either one is morbidly anxious about the wind direction and gibbers continually about it, or else a sort of lunacy is produced by listening to the other Amenomaniacs. The second form is more trying to hear. I have had both.”