Lot Essay
'It was Thursday, 13 April, and their fifth day in the boats. ... Carefully, they sailed between the floes, occasionally, to Shackleton's unconcealed annoyance, bumping into bits of ice. "Our boats' dark sails show up in contrast to the masses of white pack", Worsley wrote. "We look like a fleet of marauding Vikings." Shackleton, standing up in James Caird, so as to be seen, indeed had something of the archetypal chieftain about him. "Practically ever since we had first started," Orde Lees remarked, "Sir Ernest has been standing erect day and night on the stern-counter of the Caird, only holding on to one of the stays of the little mizzen mast conning our course the whole time the boats were under way."' (R. Huntford, Shackleton, St. Ives, 1996, pp. 510-11).
'We ran before the wind through the loose pack, a man in the brow of each boat trying to pole off with a broken oar the lumps of ice which could not be avoided ... The James Caird was in the lead and bore the brunt of the encounters with the lurking fragments, then came the Dudley Docker, and the Stancomb Wills followed. I gave orders that the boats should keep thirty to forty yards apart, so that the danger of a collision, if one boat was checked by the ice, should be reduced. We may our way through the lanes until at noon we suddenly shot out of the pack into the open ocean. Sails were soon up, and, with the sun shining brightly, we enjoyed for a few hours a sense of the freedom and magic of the sea. At last we were free from the ice, in water which our ships could navigate; thoughts of home came to birth once more, and the difficulties ahead of us dwindled in fancy almost to nothing.' (Sir E. Shackleton, op. cit., pp. 64-5).
'We ran before the wind through the loose pack, a man in the brow of each boat trying to pole off with a broken oar the lumps of ice which could not be avoided ... The James Caird was in the lead and bore the brunt of the encounters with the lurking fragments, then came the Dudley Docker, and the Stancomb Wills followed. I gave orders that the boats should keep thirty to forty yards apart, so that the danger of a collision, if one boat was checked by the ice, should be reduced. We may our way through the lanes until at noon we suddenly shot out of the pack into the open ocean. Sails were soon up, and, with the sun shining brightly, we enjoyed for a few hours a sense of the freedom and magic of the sea. At last we were free from the ice, in water which our ships could navigate; thoughts of home came to birth once more, and the difficulties ahead of us dwindled in fancy almost to nothing.' (Sir E. Shackleton, op. cit., pp. 64-5).