or four and a half months, Hurley and the other 21 men huddle in the overturned boats. “The entire party of 22 sleep in this small space snugly though sardiniously,” he writes.

They mostly live on penguin and seals cooked on blubber-fueled stoves. They usually have their meals outside, at a stove, moving up one by one, day by day, so that each man gets a turn sitting near the stove. They make lamps from sardine cans, with bandages for wicks and seal oil for fuel.

Seals and penguin were getting scarce as rescue neared. On the day of rescue, Hurley and two others were serving a lunch of limpets, seaweed, and stewed seal bones.

When Shackleton arrives to save them, Hurley goes to the snow hole where he had cached his sealed cans of plates and film. “I had to preserve them almost with my life,” he later said. Thus also rescued, Hurley’s photos live on as vivid testimony to an epic of exploration.