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“All the work he did was first class,” according to his shipmate Macklin. He was never seen to take measurements: He simply looked at his job, then went away and cut the pieces, which always fit perfectly. Even Lees, who loathed him, recognized that McNish was “an expert wooden ship's man.” Although neither an officer nor a scientist, McNish was officially one of the afterguard, and his quarters were therefore not in the fo'c'sle, but in the wardroom, now relocated to the Ritz. For the fastidious Lees, eating at the same table with so unrefined a person was a kind of penance (“at scooping up peas with a knife he is a perfect juggler”). Lees would have been taken aback to learn McNish's views of the propriety of the shore party, of which he, Lees, was a member: “I have been shipmates with all sorts of men,” McNish confided to his diary, “both in sail & steam but never nothing like some of our shore party as the most filthy langue is used as terms of endearment & worse than all is tolerated.” This from an old salt whose blunt-spoken manner intimidated nearly everyone else.

Between McNish and Worsley there was likewise little love lost, McNish holding a very low and undisguised opinion of Worsley's high jinks and erratic ways. Not one of the expedition company could have guessed, in these early months of the winter of 1915, that the lives of the company would eventually depend upon the skills of these two men—the rambunctious captain and the gruff, uncouth Chippy McNish.

Finally, Frank Hurley's work remained unaffected by the change in plans. An able handyman, he kept continually busy with self-imposed tasks, such as creating an efficient “thaw box” for frozen seal meat, or carving signs for the various Ritz cubicles; his stint as an electrician in a Sydney post office enabled him to run the Endurance's little electric plant. But above all, he was occupied with his photography. Hurley's images from the earliest days of the expedition, when the Endurance first entered the pack ice, are marvelous, bold, abstract patterns shaped by the play of ship's mast against ice, or the cross formed by mast and yard arm against a lead of open water. They reflect what must have been the heady sensation of having the whole of Antarctica as a bare, white canvas to be etched by the stark, clean lines of the Endurance and her shadow.

“Frank Hurley”

“Hurley, our photographer, is an interesting character. He is Australian—very Australian & was photographer on Sir Douglas Mawson's recent Australasian Antarctic expedition to Adelie Land. As a photographer he excels & I doubt if his work could be equalled even by Ponting.…” ( Lees, diary)

“H is a marvel,” Worsley wrote towards the end of January. “[W]ith cheerful Australian profanity he perambulates alone aloft & everywhere, in the most dangerous & slippery places he can find, content & happy at all times but cursing so if he can get a good or novel picture. Stands bare & hair waving in the wind, where we are gloved & helmeted, he snaps his snaps or winds his handle turning out curses of delight & pictures of Life by the fathom.”

Once the Endurance became trapped, Hurley turned his camera to both the domestic life of the ship, and to the vision of it improbably suspended in the protean world of the ice. On duty at all hours of the day or night, sometimes arising at midnight to take photographs, he was keenly sensitive to the variegated and ever-changing play of light, continually elated at this spectacle of sky and ice and shadows.

Hurley

This photograph shows Hurley with both his still and his movie film cameras.

The cold temperatures increased the difficulties of every aspect of his work. To guard against the condensation that developed on his cameras when they were carried from the outside into the ship's warmer interior, Hurley made a storage cupboard on deck, where they could be kept at a fairly constant temperature.

“Nevertheless,” he wrote, “my apparatus needs attention every occasion it is taken