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When we beg on our knees to be let off this time,

Then you know that Kerr's threatened to sing.

The overall health of the party was not as good as it had been at Patience Camp. As Lees noted, any of the men would have preferred the dry cold of the floes to the humid cold of Elephant Island. A number of cases of septic wounds and other minor complaints were registered, and Rickinson, while more or less recovered from his heart ailment, was suffering from saltwater boils that would not heal. Hudson was still “done up” and had developed a huge, painful abscess on his left buttock. Green-street was also suffering from frostbite, although not as seriously as Blackborow.

Blackborow's condition had become so grave that Macklin and McIlroy, who were closely monitoring him, had braced themselves for the possibility of having to amputate his feet. By June, his right foot seemed to be on the mend, but the toes of the left foot had become gangrenous and needed to be removed. Requiring a temperature high enough to vaporize their scant supply of chloroform, they waited for the first mild day to perform the operation.

On June 15, all hands except for Wild, Hurley, How, and other invalids were sent outside while the Snuggery was converted into an operating theater. A platform of food boxes covered with blankets served as an operating table, and Hurley stoked the bogie stove with penguin skins, eventually raising the temperature to 79°. The few surgical instruments were boiled in the hoosh pot. Macklin and McIlroy stripped to their undershirts, the cleanest layer of clothing they possessed. While Macklin administered the anaesthetic, McIlroy performed the surgery. Hudson averted his face; Hurley, characteristically unsqueamish, found it fascinating, as did Greenstreet, who was lying nearby recovering from rheumatism.

“Blackborow had an operation on his toes today,” wrote Greenstreet, who was suffering from frostbite and rheumatism, “having all the toes of his left foot taken off about 1?4 ? stumps being left. I was one of the few who watched the operation and it was most interesting. The poor beggar behaved splendidly.”

Wild, who lent a hand in the operation, showed no revulsion as McIlroy slit and peeled back the skin of Blackborow's foot.

“He is a hard case,” Macklin wrote.

When the operation was completed, the rest of the party were called in again, while Blackborow slept off the chloroform. He was a great favorite of all hands, and his cheerfulness both before and after the ordeal was much admired. Lees was impressed by his fortitude too, but the operation had caused him personal concern.

“Practically the whole of the available anaesthetic was used up,” he wrote, “so that if I have to have my leg off, not that there is anything whatever the matter with it at present.… I shall have to have it done without anaesthetic.”

His consternation inspired Hussey to write new verses:

When the Doctors dance round with joy on their faces,

And sharpen up knives and take saws from their cases,

When Mack spits on his hands and Mick hoists up his braces,

Then you know that the Colonel's gone sick.

The addition of several small windowpanes, made of a chronometer case and piece of celluloid that Hurley had stashed in the pages of a book, cast murky new light inside the hut, reawakening the men to the general squalor of the conditions in which they lived. Grease, blubber smoke and soot, reindeer hairs, seal and penguin blood, melting guano were embedded into every crack and fiber of the hut and their few possessions. Scraps of meat dropped in the darkness festered unseen on the floor. At night a two-gallon petrol can was used as a urinal, so as to spare the men a long, stumbling journey past a row of sleeping bags, out into the icy night. Wild's rule was that the man who filled the can to within two inches of capacity was responsible for taking it outside and emptying it; but all hands became adept at gauging the volume remaining in the can by the noise it made as it got filled. If it sounded