“To-night the temperature has dropped to -16° Fahr., and most of the men are cold and uncomfortable.  After the tents had been pitched I mustered all hands and explained the position to them briefly and, I hope, clearly.  I have told them the distance to the Barrier and the distance to Paulet Island, and have stated that I propose to try to march with equipment across the ice in the direction of Paulet Island.  I thanked the men for the steadiness and good morale they have shown in these trying circumstances, and told them I had no doubt that, provided they continued to work their utmost and to trust me, we will all reach safety in the end.  Then we had supper, which the cook had prepared at the big blubber-stove, and after a watch had been set all hands except the watch turned in.”  For myself, I could not sleep.  The destruction and abandonment of the ship was no sudden shock.  The disaster had been looming ahead for many months, and I had studied my plans for all contingencies a hundred times.  But the thoughts that came to me as I walked up and down in the darkness were not particularly cheerful.  The task now was to secure the safety of the party, and to that I must bend my energies and mental power and apply every bit of knowledge that experience of the Antarctic had given me.  The task was likely to be long and strenuous, and an ordered mind and a clear programme were essential if we were to come through without loss of life.  A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground.

At midnight I was pacing the ice, listening to the grinding floe and to the groans and crashes that told of the death-agony of the ‘Endurance’, when I noticed suddenly a crack running across our floe right through the camp.  The alarm-whistle brought all hands tumbling out, and we moved the tents and stores lying on what was now the smaller portion of the floe to the larger portion.  Nothing more could be done at that moment, and the men turned in again; but there was little sleep.  Each time I came to the end of my beat on the floe I could just see in the darkness the uprearing piles of pressure-ice, which toppled over and narrowed still further the little floating island we occupied.  I did not notice at the time that my tent, which had been on the wrong side of the crack, had not been erected again.  Hudson and James had managed to squeeze themselves into other tents, and Hurley had wrapped himself in the canvas of No. 1 tent.  I discovered this about 5 a.m.  All night long the electric light gleamed from the stern of the dying ‘Endurance’.  Hussey had left this light switched on when he took a last observation, and, like a lamp in a cottage window, it braved the night until in the early morning the ‘Endurance’ received a particularly violent squeeze.  There was a sound of rending beams and the light disappeared.  The connexion had been cut.