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By Root 815 0

Docker, around midnight, Cheetham heard the boat's back cracking, and all hands scurried to shift their stores. Huddled under the canvas of one of the tents, Green-street managed to light a match so that Worsley could glimpse his tiny compass. Later, some of the crew noticed that Worsley himself did not seem to hear them anymore, that his head was sinking on his chest. When at last he was persuaded to surrender the helm to Greenstreet, he was so stiff from hunching over the tiller that he could not unbend, and his rigid muscles had to be massaged before he could lie straight on the bottom of the boat: He had not slept for more than ninety hours.

“It was,” wrote Shackleton, “a stern night.” The James Caird had taken the limping Stancomb Wills in tow, though at times the latter was lost to sight, vanishing into the deep trough of the swell, then reemerging from the black sea, tossed on the crest of a wave. The survival of the Wills, the least sound of the boats, depended upon her keeping contact with the Caird, and throughout the night Shackleton sat with his hand on her painter, as it grew heavy with ice. He must have been very near exhaustion.

“Practically ever since we had first started Sir Ernest had been standing erect day and night on the stern-counter of the Caird,“ Lees wrote. “How he stood the incessant vigil and exposure is marvelous.” Shackleton had not slept since leaving Patience Camp.

A sudden heavy squall of snow hid the boats from one another, and when it cleared, the Dudley Docker was gone; she had vanished into the darkness and the racing sea. For Shackleton, this was perhaps the worst moment of the journey.

When the dawn came at last, the air was so thick with mist that the men aboard the Caird and the Wills were under the cliffs of Elephant Island before they saw them. Anxiously, they followed the precipitous coastline until at 9 a.m. they sighted a narrow beach at the northwest end of the island, beyond a fringe of surf-beaten rocks.

“I decided we must face the hazards of this unattractive landing-place,” wrote Shackleton. “Two days and nights without drink or hot food had played havoc with most of the men.” His own throat and tongue were so swollen he could only whisper, and his orders were passed along by either Wild or Hurley. Shackleton boarded the Wills to take her through first, and as he did so the Dudley Docker hove in sight.

“This,” wrote Shackleton, “took a great load off my mind.”

The Wills was carefully positioned at an opening in the reef, then shot through on the top of waves to the rough stony beach beyond. Shackleton gave the word that Blackborow, as the youngest member of the expedition, should have the honor of being the first to land; but Blackborow sat motionless.

“In order to avoid delay I helped him, perhaps a little roughly, over the side of the boat,” wrote Shackleton. “He promptly sat down in the surf and did not move. Then I suddenly realized what I had forgotten, that both his feet were frost-bitten badly.”

The Docker followed the Wills, and then the James Caird, too heavy to land, was unloaded in tedious relays before being taken through the reef and beached beside the other boats.

The men staggered onto land. With his Vest Pocket Kodak camera in hand, Hurley bounded out to record the landing of the boats and the first meal on Elephant Island.

“Some of the men were reeling about the beach as if they had found an unlimited supply of alcoholic liquor on the desolate island,” Shackleton wrote. His bemused, paternal tone conjures an almost comical scene of readjustment; but the diaries hint darkly at the journey's actual toll.

“Many suffered from temporary aberration,” Hurley reported, “walking aimlessly about; others shivering as with palsy.” “Hudson,” McNish states with characteristic directness, “has gone of [f ] his head.”

Some filled their pockets with stones, or rolled along the shingled beach, burying their faces in the stones and pouring handfuls over them.

“In the Wills, only two men were fit to do anything,” Wordie recorded. “Some fellows moreover were half