Morning came in chill and cheerless.  All hands were stiff and weary after their first disturbed night on the floe.  Just at daybreak I went over to the ‘Endurance’ with Wild and Hurley, in order to retrieve some tins of petrol that could be used to boil up milk for the rest of the men.  The ship presented a painful spectacle of chaos and wreck.  The jib-boom and bowsprit had snapped off during the night and now lay at right angles to the ship, with the chains, martingale, and bob-stay dragging them as the vessel quivered and moved in the grinding pack.  The ice had driven over the forecastle and she was well down by the head.  We secured two tins of petrol with some difficulty, and postponed the further examination of the ship until after breakfast.  Jumping across cracks with the tins, we soon reached camp, and built a fireplace out of the triangular water-tight tanks we had ripped from the lifeboat.  This we had done in order to make more room.  Then we pierced a petrol-tin in half a dozen places with an ice-axe and set fire to it.  The petrol blazed fiercely under the five-gallon drum we used as a cooker, and the hot milk was ready in quick time.  Then we three ministering angels went round the tents with the life-giving drink, and were surprised and a trifle chagrined at the matter-of-fact manner in which some of the men accepted this contribution to their comfort.  They did not quite understand what work we had done for them in the early dawn, and I heard Wild say, “If any of you gentlemen would like your boots cleaned just put them outside.”  This was his gentle way of reminding them that a little thanks will go a long way on such occasions.

The cook prepared breakfast, which consisted of biscuit and hoosh, at 8 a.m., and I then went over to the ‘Endurance’ again and made a fuller examination of the wreck.  Only six of the cabins had not been pierced by floes and blocks of ice.  Every one of the starboard cabins had been crushed.  The whole of the after part of the ship had been crushed concertina fashion.  The forecastle and the Ritz were submerged, and the wardroom was three-quarters full of ice.  The starboard side of the wardroom had come away.  The motor-engine forward had been driven through the galley.  Petrol-cases that had been stacked on the fore-deck had been driven by the floe through the wall into the wardroom and had carried before them a large picture.  Curiously enough, the glass of this picture had not been cracked, whereas in the immediate neighbourhood I saw heavy iron davits that had been twisted and bent like the ironwork of a wrecked train.  The ship was being crushed remorselessly.