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

Only very occasionally did they think about South Georgia. It was so remote, so Utopian that it was almost depressing to contemplate. No man could have endured with just that to keep him going. Instead, life was reckoned in periods of a few hours, or possibly only a few minutes—an endless succession of trials leading to deliverance from the

those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed.

They were in the boats . . . actually in the boats, and that was all that mattered. They thought neither of Patience Camp nor of an hour hence. There was only the present, and that meant row . . . get away . . . escape.

The truth was that he felt rather out of his element. He had proved himself on land. He had demonstrated there beyond all doubt his ability to pit his matchless tenacity against the elements—and win. But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle

In time even his supply was exhausted, and there followed a period of depression that amounted almost to mourning. But the desire to smoke was so strong that before long experiments were begun to find a substitute.

Scott and his three companions died as they struggled, weak with scurvy, to return to their base.

Macklin commented: “I cannot help feeling sorry for Worsley at the mouth of our tent, for he gets the wet brought in by everybody.” Worsley, however, was far from distressed. He wrote in his diary that same night: “The rapidity with which one can completely change one’s ideas . . . and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful.”

Shackleton searched their faces for an answer to the question that troubled him most: How much more could they take? There was no single answer. Some men looked on the point of breaking, while others showed an unmistakable determination to hold out. At least, all of them had survived the night.