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Shackleton's order that the boats stay in hailing distance of one another became increasingly difficult to obey. The Stancomb Wills was knee-deep in water, and Holness, one of the trawlerhands who previously made his living braving the icy north Atlantic, covered his face and wept with sheer terror and misery. Worsley, drawing abreast of the James Caird, suggested to Shackleton that they run through the night; but Shackleton, wary as ever of splitting his party, and afraid they might even overrun the island in the darkness, gave the order to lay to. It was a hard decision to make.

“I doubted if all the men would survive that night,” he stated simply. On top of all else, they had no water. Usually, ice was taken on board at each “campsite,” but the hasty departure from the veering floe the night before had made this impossible. Tormented by the salt spray flung continually in their faces, the men's mouths were swollen and their lips bloody. Frozen raw seal meat provided the only relief.

Sea anchors, made of canvas and oars lashed together, were flung overboard, and there began the third night in the boats. Through all the demanding days and all the long and terrible hours of darkness, the helmsmen—Wild and McNish, Hudson and Crean, Worsley and Greenstreet—had remained immovable at their posts as waves crashed over them, as their clothes froze upon them, as the wind and spray stung their tired faces.

The wind subsided in the night, and at dawn the sleepless men beheld the glorious mauve sunrise that flashed on the eastern horizon; and only thirty miles directly ahead lay Clarence Island, its snow-clad peak glowing in the dawn. Later, in full daylight, Elephant Island appeared, exactly on the bearings that Worsley had calculated, in Shackleton's words, “with two days' dead reckoning while following a devious course through the pack-ice and after drifting during two nights at the mercy of wind and waves.” Elephant Island was the less precipitous of the two; additionally, it lay to windward, ensuring that if the boats missed their first attempted landfall, they would have Clarence Island as alternative to their lee.

The night had taken its toll.

“At least half of the party were insane,” according to Wild, “fortunately not violent, simply helpless and hopeless.” The Stancomb Wills drew abreast of the Caird to report that Hudson had collapsed after seventy-two hours at the helm, and Blackborow reported that “there was something wrong” with his feet. Continual immersion in salt water had caused the eruption of painful boils on many men; their bodies were badly chafed, and their mouths throbbed with thirst. As the wind died they took to the oars, a task made painful by the blisters on their hands. By three in the afternoon, the boats were only ten miles from land, the harsh glaciers and icy mountains of Elephant Island now discernable in fine detail. At this point, the men encountered a strong tidal current that held the boats at bay. After a solid hour of rowing at the pitch of their strength, they were not so much as a mile closer to the island.

At five o'clock, lowering skies to the northwest darkened, and shortly afterward a storm broke. There would be no landfall after all, but another night in the pitching boats.

“We were in the midst of confused lumpy seas which running…from two directions were far more dangerous for small boats than the straight running waves of a heavy gale in open seas,” Worsley wrote. “The boats could never settle down, and to steer became a work of art.”

Now all three boats were bailed continuously; in the belabored Stancomb Wills, four of the eight men were completely incapacitated: McIlroy, How, and Bakewell bailed through the night for their lives and those of their shipmates, while Crean held the tiller. In the James Caird, McNish relieved Wild at the helm, but briefly fell asleep, exhausted. Wild, unshaken, unchanged, took over again, “his steel-blue eyes,” as Shackleton recorded with affectionate pride, looking “out to the day ahead.” In the