“Of all their enemies -- the cold  the ice  the sea -- he feared none more than demoralization.
Alfred Lansing  Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage


Monday  December 21   was beautifully fine  with a gentle west-north-westerly breeze. We made a start at 3 a.m. and proceeded through the pack in a south-westerly direction. At noon we had gained seven miles almost due east  the northerly drift of the pack having continued while the ship was apparently moving to the south. Petrels of several species  penguins  and seals were plentiful  and we saw four small blue whales. At noon we entered a long lead to the southward and passed
around and between nine splendid bergs. One mighty specimen was shaped like the Rock of Gibraltar but with steeper cliffs  and another had a natural dock that would have contained the Aquitania. A spur of ice closed the entrance to the huge blue pool. Hurley brought out his kinematograph-camera  in order to make a record of these bergs. Fine long leads running east and south-east among bergs were found during the afternoon  but at midnight the ship was stopped by small  heavy ice-floes 
tightly packed against an unbroken plain of ice. The outlook from the mast-head was not encouraging. The big floe was at least 15 miles long and 10 miles wide. The edge could not be seen at the widest part  and the area of the floe must have been not less than 150 square miles. It appeared to be formed of year-old ice  not very thick and with very few hummocks or ridges in it. We thought it must have been formed at sea in very calm weather and drifted up from the south-east. I had never seen such a large area of unbroken ice in the Ross Sea.