Ernest Shackelton’s diary

Tuesday 27th March 1915

The end came at last today:she had to rest.This gruelling,hazardous journey she had made came to an abrupt halt. No ship built on human land could have held the unbearable strain. I instructed all men to abandon ship -along with their essentials- and onto the floe. No hope. No home. No safety. The faces around me looked tired. Anxious. Hopeless. But we must continue. We can survive. 

Wednesday 28th March 1915

All I could see was: ice, ice and more ice. Icebergs jutted out like trees in meadows, glistening like quartz. These wastelands of ice you couldn’t even compare to a WW1 battlefield, how muddy or how many dead bodies there were, was our only choice of camp. Endeavour’s last poles bobbed into the freezing waters of Elephant Island, with men reaching out for pieces of wood to use for their camps. Blizzards played their part too, like an onslaught of blinding, white snow. I hoped we wouldn’t die here...

Thursday 29th March 1915

“What are we going to do, Ernest?” Nearly everyone questioned me. I could only reply with “I’ll think about it.” The truth was; I wasn’t. I could only think now about how low the morale is and how we’d survive here. Our activities were restricted to singing around a fire and, somehow, football (we had to use wood as goalposts and a rock as a ball). We all felt alone in these vast ice plains, with waves crashing to the west and to the east. The Endeavour was gone, we were thousands of miles away from help and we were losing men, I predict the outcome being bad. 

“How does this end?” I said, looking into the sky that blazed with anger. Only a fraction of hope was left...