Erasure
from Shackleton’s South, 1919
September 4
September 4.—Temperature, –14.1°. Light breeze, blue sky, stratus clouds. During forenoon, distinct terra-cotta colour, travelled from some Graham Land volcanoes, distant — the upper current of air. Heavy rime. Pack unbroken, unchanged, as far as visible. No land for 22 miles. No animal life observed.
September 7
September 7.—Temperature, –10.8°. Moderate winds, overcast, light snow till midnight, when weather cleared. Blue sky, fine clear weather. Much rime aloft. Thick fresh snow glistens in the morning sunlight. Little clouds of violet-coloured mist rise from the pack, which stretches unbroken to the horizon.
Very great refraction. A berg is a good index of the amount of refraction — the pack beyond it lifts up into view. Other bergs, at first sight, lost, after closer scrutiny appear as large lumps, dark masses, well below the horizon. The horizon is thrown up so much the altitude is about 12´ too small.
No land visible for twenty miles. No animal life observed.
Worsley
Her staunchness and endurance, almost past belief, again and again — nipped with a million-ton pressure, risen, falling clear. Thrown to and fro like a shuttlecock. Strained, her beams arched upwards, her sides opened and closed, bent and curved along her length, groaning like a living thing.
It will be sad if such a brave little craft should be finally crushed in the remorseless, slowly strangling grip, after ten months of the bravest and most gallant fight ever put up by a ship.
October 27
Wednesday, October 27. The temperature was –8.5°, a gentle breeze, the sun shone in a clear sky.
After long months of ceaseless anxiety and strain, after times when hope beat high and times when the outlook was black indeed, the end has come. We are alive and well. It is hard to write what I feel. To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home. Now, straining and groaning, her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career.
She is crushed and abandoned after drifting more than 570 miles, 281 days since she became locked in the ice. 346 miles from Paulet Island, the nearest point where there is any possibility of finding food and shelter. We could not take food enough; the weight would be too great.
This morning, our last on the ship, the weather was clear. From the crow’s-nest there was no sign of land of any sort. The pressure was increasing steadily, and the passing hours brought no relief. The attack of the ice reached its climax at 4 p.m. The driving floe split the rudder and tore out the rudder-post and stern-post. The decks were breaking upwards and the water was pouring in below. At 5 p.m. I ordered all hands on to the ice. It was a sickening sensation to feel the decks breaking up under one’s feet, the great beams bending and then snapping with a noise like heavy gunfire.
Just before leaving, I looked down the engine-room skylight and saw the engines dropping sideways as the stays and bed-plates gave way. I cannot describe the impression of relentless destruction forced upon me as I looked down and around. The floes, with the force of millions of tons of moving ice behind them, were simply annihilating the ship.
— Endurance