One man said that at least half the men were insane by the end. Upon landing on the rocky, desolate shore of Elephant Island, several men wandered about as if drunk, filling their pockets with stones and rolling along the shingled beach like drunks at a picnic. One man grabbed an axe and began slaughtering seals along the beach. They had been seven days in small, open boats in the South Atlantic at the start of an Antarctic winter; they had spent 170 days drifting on an ice floe with pitiful food and shelter; they had not set foot on land since December 5, 1914, a period of 497 days.

Their relief at landfall was short-lived. After a scant three days ashore, during which a near-mutiny was quelled, Shackleton announced that he and a party of five would sail the largest of the three boats 800 miles to South Georgia and the whaling stations there. Having nearly died after a journey of only 60 miles, the men knew the odds of success were incalculably small.

Alexander writes,

To reach it, a twenty-two-and-a-half-foot long open boat would have to cross the most formidable ocean on the planet, in the winter. They could expect winds up to 80 miles an hour, and heaving waves ... as much as sixty feet in height.... They would be navigating towards a small island, with no points of land in between, using a sextant and chronometer – under brooding skies that might not permit a single navigational sighting. The task was not merely formidable; it was, as every sailing man of the company knew, impossible.

The diminutive "James Caird," reinforced by the ship's carpenter with a flimsy canvas decking and a few extra inches of freeboard, set sail on April 24, 1916, leaving behind 22 men waving pathetically from the frozen shore of Elephant Island. Alexander says, "They had insufficient clothing and no shelter. They had no food or fuel except for penguins and seals, which could not be counted on ... forever." If Shackleton's voyage in the James Caird should not succeed the men would surely die where they were.

As for Shackleton and his little crew, "the tale of the next sixteen days is one of supreme strife amid heaving waters." They ate a kind of stew made of beef brick, lard, oatmeal, and sugar. They huddled in wet, makeshift sleeping bags of reindeer skin that disintegrated and rotted and left stinking clumps of bristly hair in their mouths, their food, their clothes. They sailed through blizzards and raging gales. Their navigator cursed and prayed; if they missed their landfall they would be swept into 3,000 miles of ocean.

Spray breaking upon the boat froze almost on impact and soon the little boat was encased in ice fifteen inches thick and began to sink. The men's hands were black with grime, blubber, burns, and frostbite. On May 8, after 15 days at sea, they sighted land and hove to. They were 150 miles from the whaling stations and the weather was threatening gale but they had run out of water two days earlier and had to land.

They found themselves pinned down, eighteen miles from shore, unable to land in the gale force winds and high seas. The storm became a hurricane and nearly drove them aground. They battled the storm and the currents for another day and waited for the seas to calm. Finally, on May 10, the storm cleared and they made their way to King Haakon Bay, finally landing around dusk. They fell to their knees and drank from a small stream nearby. They had survived the impossible.

In Alexander's words:

Together, the six men had maintained a ship routine, a structure of command, a schedule of watches. They had been mindful of their seamanship under the most severe circumstances a sailor would ever face. They had not merely endured; they had exhibited the grace of expertise under ungodly pressure.... (I)n the carefully weighed judgment of authorities yet to come, the voyage of the James Caird would be ranked as one of the greatest boat journeys ever accomplished.

Not a life lost