In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.

This is said in reference to having to wipe their asses with ice, which didn't play well with a diet of straight seal meat.

McNeish and McLeod began mounting the whaler and one of the cutters onto sledges. The boats with their sledges would weigh more than a ton apiece, and nobody had any delusions that it would be easy to drag them over the chaotic surface of the ice, with its pressure ridges occasionally two stories high.

Nevertheless, there was a remarkable absence of discouragement. All the men were in a state of dazed fatigue, and nobody paused to reflect on the terrible consequences of losing their ship.”

The date that the voyage departed was right after Britain entered World War I. They still got the blessing from the admiral of the Navy (Winston Churchill)

Cook would make people cakes on their birthdays during the winter when they first got embanked:

Green was occasionally the victim of the almost merciless ribbing that all ships’ cooks everywhere are subjected to, but he had his jokes, too. Two or three times, when some crewman’s birthday was to be celebrated, he produced a cake for the occasion. One proved to be a blown-up toy balloon which he had carefully frosted, and another was a block of wood, daintily covered with icing.

ship sank and they sat on drifting ice hoping to most towards the rendezvous, like 2mi a day, unable to haul their boats through the ice. Eventually had to kill their dogs

In a description of how some of the men begin to lose faith in Shackleton's leadership, one of them devised a code so that he could jot down his thoughts without fear of anybody reading his thoughts. The author just blows right onto this and says here's the message when he evidently had no difficulty decoding, which is hilarious:

Inevitably the old resentments against Shackleton’s refusal to get in all possible game when it was available cropped up. Even Macklin, who had refrained from all criticism of Shackleton’s policy in the past, felt so strongly that he devised a code so he could comment on the subject in his diary without fearing that his thoughts would be read by others.

On the seventeenth, he wrote in code: “I think the Boss was a bit improvident in not getting in all the food possible whilst the going was good. It was worth the risk.” Then on the eighteenth: “Lees tackled the Boss a few days ago about getting in all food possible [from Ocean Camp] in the event of having to winter on the floe. Boss rather snapped at him saying ‘It will do some of these people good to go hungry, their bloody appetites are too big!’

Four months after Shackleton, Worsley et al left the camp with the Caird to return to rescue the twenty-two castaways on Elephant Island,

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