we had experienced.  The decks shuddered and jumped, beams arched, and stanchions buckled and shook.  I ordered all hands to stand by in readiness for whatever emergency might arise.  Even the dogs seemed to feel the tense anxiety of the moment.  But the ship resisted valiantly, and just when it appeared that the limit of her strength was being reached the huge floe that was pressing down upon us cracked across and so gave relief.

“The behaviour of our ship in the ice has been magnificent,” wrote Worsley.  “Since we have been beset her staunchness and endurance have been almost past belief again and again.  She has been nipped with a million-ton pressure and risen nobly, falling clear of the water out on the ice.  She has been thrown to and fro like a shuttlecock a dozen times.  She has been strained, her beams arched upwards, by the fearful pressure; her very sides opened and closed again as she was actually 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 of the Weddell pack after ten months of the bravest and most gallant fight ever put up by a ship.”

The ‘Endurance’ deserved all that could be said in praise of her.  Shipwrights had never done sounder or better work; but how long could she continue the fight under such conditions?  We were drifting into the congested area of the western Weddell Sea, the worst portion of the worst sea in the world, where the pack, forced on irresistibly by wind and current, impinges on the western shore and is driven up in huge corrugated ridges and chaotic fields of pressure.  The vital question for us was whether or not the ice would open sufficiently to release us, or at least give us a chance of release, before the drift carried us into the most dangerous area.  There was no answer to be got from the silent bergs and the grinding floes, and we faced the month of October with anxious hearts.

The leads in the pack appeared to have opened out a little on October 1, but not sufficiently to be workable even if we had been able to release the ‘Endurance’ from the floe.  The day was calm, cloudy and misty in the forenoon and clearer in the afternoon, when we observed well-defined parhelia.  The ship was subjected to slight pressure at intervals.  Two bull crab-eaters climbed on to the floe close to the ship and were shot by Wild.  They were both big animals in prime condition, and I felt that there was no more need for anxiety as to the supply of fresh meat for the dogs.  Seal-liver made a welcome change in our own menu.  The two bulls were marked, like many of their kind, with long parallel scars about three inches apart, evidently the work of the killers.  A bull we killed on the following day had four parallel scars, sixteen inches long, on each side of its body; they were fairly deep and one flipper had been nearly torn away.  The creature must have escaped from the jaws of a killer by a very small margin.  Evidently life beneath the pack is not always monotonous.  We noticed that several of the bergs in the neighbourhood of the ship were changing their relative positions more than they had done for months past.  The floes were moving.