he ship’s carpenter builds winter quarters between decks: a collection of six-by-five-foot cubicles housing two men each. They all eat at a table heated by a stove, an area dubbed “The Ritz.” Hurley gives magic-lantern talks there while ice grinds against the hull—“the first murmur of danger,” Shackleton calls the ominous sound.

“From within the cosiness of the Ritz,” Hurley writes in his diary, “it is hard to imagine we are drifting, frozen and solid in a sea of pack ice in the heart of the Weddell Sea.” He records the everyday shipboard life and, to pass the time, plays chess because it “exercises one’s otherwise stagnant intellect.”

Shackleton calls Hurley “our handy man,” for he installs electric lights and sets up floodlights on poles outside the ship. They illuminate the “dogloos,” the winter quarters for the sled dogs. So, even on the darkest winter day there will be light in case the floe suddenly cracks and the dogs must be hastily brought aboard.

c o n t i n u e . . .