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Mr. Vega, who was, according to Hurley, the town's leading photographer.

“3rd September Sunday. Beautiful sunrise, with fine mist effects over the hills & distant mts. surrounding Punta Arenas. Shortly after 7 a.m. Sir E. rowed ashore & telephoned our arrival on to Punta Arenas, so that the populace might roll up and greet us after church, we being due to arrive at 12 noon. The Yelcho was bedecked with flags.…On nearing the jetty we were deafened by the tooting of whistles & cheering motor craft, which was taken up by the vast gathering on the piers & water-fronts.” ( Hurley, diary)

“To My Comrades”

So on the deep and open sea I set

Forth, with a single ship and that small band

Of comrades that had never left me yet.

—DANTE, “VOYA GE OF ULYSSES,” L'Inferno

“Tell me, when was the war over?” Shackleton had asked Sørlle, on arriving at Stromness Station after crossing South Georgia.

“The war is not over,” Sørlle had replied. “Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”

During their ordeal on the ice, the war had been a frequent topic of conversation, with the men chiefly concerned that they would miss it entirely by the time they got home. Before boarding the Yelcho, Shackleton had taken pains to collect mail that had been waiting for the men at South Georgia, as well as newspapers, to give them some idea of what they had missed in the nearly two years they had been out of touch with the world.

“ ‘Opinions have changed on all sorts of subjects,' “ Lees reports Shackleton as telling them on the Yelcho. “‘They call it the Roll of Honour now instead of the Casualty List.'”

“The reader may not realize quite how difficult it was for us to envisage nearly two years of the most stupendous war of history,” wrote Shackleton, in his own book, South. “The locking of the armies in the trenches, the sinking of the Lusitania, the murder of Nurse Cavell, the use of poison-gas and liquid fire, the submarine war fare, the Gallipoli campaign, the hundred other incidents of the war, almost stunned us at first.… I suppose our experience was unique. No other civilized men could have been as blankly ignorant of world-shaking happenings as we were when we reached Stromness Whaling Station.”

The war had changed everything—and most of all the heroic ideal. With millions of Europe's young men dead, Britain was not particularly interested in survival sto ries. The news of the Endurance expedition was so extraordinary that it could not fail to fill popular headlines; but Shackleton's official reception was markedly cool. Facetiously describing his arrival in Stanley, in the Falklands, after the failure of the Southern Sky rescue mission, the paper John Bull gave this account.

“Not a soul in Stanley seemed to care one scrap [about his arrival]! Not a single flag was flown.… An old kelper remarked, ‘ 'E ought ter 'ave been at the war long ago instead of messing about on icebergs.'”

In Punta Arenas, Shackleton and his men received an almost riotous welcome, with the town's various nationalities—including the Germans, with whom Britain was at war—pouring out with bands and flags to greet them. Shackleton had cannily stopped off in Río Seco, some six miles away, to alert Punta Arenas by telephone of his imminent arrival. The Foreign Office was quick to see publicity value in his popularity, and encouraged Shackleton to call upon those governments that had come to his assistance. And so with a handful of his men, he went to Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. Pointedly, he paid no visit to the British Falklands.

The Endurance expedition ended on October 8, 1916, in Buenos Aires, but Shackle-ton still had work to do. The other half of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the Ross Sea depot-laying party on the opposite side of the globe, had gone adrift, literally: The expedition's ship Aurora had come untethered from her mooring and then been prevented from returning to “port” by the pack ice. Another saga of survival—involving one of the most formidable feats