The dawn of April 13 came clear and bright, with occasional passing clouds.  Most of the men were now looking seriously worn and strained.  Their lips were cracked and their eyes and eyelids showed red in their salt-encrusted faces.  The beards even of the younger men might have been those of patriarchs, for the frost and the salt spray had made them white.  I called the ‘Dudley Docker’ alongside and found the condition of the people there was no better than in the ‘James Caird’.  Obviously we must make land quickly, and I decided to run for Elephant Island.  The wind had shifted fair for that rocky isle, then about one hundred miles away, and the pack that separated us from Hope Bay had closed up during the night from the south.  At 6 p.m. we made a distribution of stores among the three boats, in view of the possibility of their being separated.  The preparation of a hot breakfast was out of the question.  The breeze was strong and the sea was running high in the loose pack around us.  We had a cold meal, and I gave orders that all hands might eat as much as they pleased, this concession being due partly to a realization that we would have to jettison some of our stores when we reached open sea in order to lighten the boats.  I hoped, moreover, that a full meal of cold rations would compensate to some extent for the lack of warm food and shelter.  Unfortunately, some of the men were unable to take advantage of the extra food owing to seasickness.  Poor fellows, it was bad enough to be huddled in the deeply laden, spray-swept boats, frost-bitten and half-frozen, without having the pangs of seasickness added to the list of their woes.  But some smiles were caused even then by the plight of one man, who had a habit of accumulating bits of food against the day of starvation that he seemed always to think was at hand, and who was condemned now to watch impotently while hungry comrades with undisturbed stomachs made biscuits, rations, and sugar disappear with extraordinary rapidity.

We ran before the wind through the loose pack, a man in the bow of each boat trying to pole off with a broken oar the lumps of ice that could not be avoided.  I regarded speed as essential.  Sometimes collisions were not averted.  The ‘James Caird’ was in the lead, where she bore the brunt of the encounter with lurking fragments, and she was holed above the water-line by a sharp spur of ice, but this mishap did not stay us.  Later the wind became stronger and we had to reef sails, so as not to strike the ice too heavily.  The ‘Dudley Docker’ came next to the ‘James Caird’ and the ‘Stancomb Wills’ followed.  I had given order that the boats should keep 30 or 40 yds. apart, so as to reduce the danger of a collision if one boat was checked by the ice.  The pack was thinning, and we came to occasional open areas where thin ice had formed during the night.  When we encountered this new ice we had to shake the reef out of the sails in order to force a way through.  Outside of the pack the wind must have been of hurricane force.  Thousands of small dead fish were to be seen, killed probably by a cold current and the heavy weather.  They floated in the water and lay on the ice, where they had been cast by the waves.  The petrels and skua-gulls were swooping down and picking them up like sardines off toast.