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“Manager say: ‘Who the hell are you?' and terrible bearded man in the centre of the three say very quietly: ‘My name is Shackleton.' Me—I turn away and weep.”

They had done it all; and now long-held dreams came true. Hot baths, the first in two years; a shave, clean new clothes, and all the cakes and starch they could eat. The hospitality of the whalers was boundless. After an enormous meal, Worsley was despatched with a relief ship, the Samson, to collect the rest of the party at King Haakon Bay, while Shackleton and Sørlle urgently talked over plans to rescue the men on Elephant Island.

That night, the weather took a turn for the worse. Lying in his bunk on the Sam-

“Had we been crossing that night,” he wrote, “nothing could have saved us.” McNish, McCarthy, and Vincent were sheltered under the upturned Caird when Worsley came ashore in a whaler to greet them the following morning. Thrilled to be rescued, they nonetheless grumbled that none of their own party had come and that collecting them had been left to the Norwegians.

“ ‘Well, I'm here,' “ Worsley reported himself as saying, clearly delighted by the turn of events.

“[T]hey stared,” he continued. “Clean and shaved, they had taken me for a Norwegian!”

Taking up their meager possessions, the last of the James Caird crew boarded the Samson, McNish holding his diary. Worsley had also determined to bring the James Caird along. The men had none of the depth of feeling for her they had held for the Endurance, which had sheltered and protected them as long as she was able; nonetheless, though the Caird had provided them little comfort, they and she had battled for their lives together and had won.

A great gale and snowstorm descended on the Samson as she approached Stromness, keeping her at sea for two extra days. But mindless of the weather, the men on board ate and rested to their hearts' content.

In Sørlle's home, Shackleton and Crean lay in bed, listening to the snow drive against the windows. They now knew how slim had been their margin of safety. On Sunday, May 21, Shackleton sailed round to Husvik Station, also in Stromness Bay, to arrange a loan of a likely rescue ship, the English-owned Southern Sky, for immediate departure to Elephant Island. Another old friend from Endurance days, Captain Thom, was in the harbor and immediately signed on as captain; the whalers eagerly volunteered as crew.

When the Samson arrived in the harbor, the men from the whaling station came to greet her, and congregated around the James Caird, carrying the boat ashore on their shoulders.

“The Norwegians would not let us put a hand to her,” wrote Worsley. That same night, Monday evening, Sørlle held a reception at the station clubhouse for Shackle-ton, and invited the captains and officers of his whaling fleet.

“They were ‘old stagers,' “ Shackleton recorded, “with faces lined and seamed by the storms of half a century.”

The club room was “blue and hazy with tobacco smoke,” according to Worsley. “Three or four white-haired veterans of the sea came forward. One spoke in Norse, and the Manager translated. He said he had been at sea over 40 years; that he knew feat of daring seamanship as bringing the 22-foot open boat from Elephant Island to South Georgia. … All the seamen present then came forward and solemnly shook hands with us in turn. Coming from brother seamen, men of our own cloth and members of a great seafaring race like the Norwegians, this was a wonderful tribute.”

Passages back to England were arranged for McNish, Vincent, and McCarthy; tensions between McNish and Vincent and the rest of the party seem to have persisted until the very end. McNish's description of Worsley doing “the Nimrod,” a facetious reference to the great biblical hunter, shows that he had lost none of his fine sardonic touch in the course of the journey. Likewise, his dry observation that Vincent remained in his bag smoking while others did work suggests that Vincent's performance in the boats had not changed the carpenter's opinion of this young cub of a trawler. The attitude of Shackleton