Here’s a great excerpt from the book I’m cur­rently reading.

“This after­noon Sallie’s three youngest pups, Sue’s Sir­ius, and Mrs. Chippy, the carpenter’s cat, have to be shot. We could not under­take the main­te­nance of weak­lings under the new con­di­tions. Mack­lin, Crean, and the car­pen­ter seemed to feel the loss of their friends rather badly. We pro­pose mak­ing a short trial jour­ney to-​morrow, start­ing with two of the boats and the ten sledges. The num­ber of dog teams has been increased to seven, Green­street tak­ing charge of the new addi­tional team, con­sist­ing of Snap­per and Sallie’s four old­est pups. We have ten work­ing sledges to relay with five teams. Wild’s and Hurley’s teams will haul the cut­ter with the assis­tance of four men. The whaler and the other boats will fol­low, and the men who are haul­ing them will be able to help with progress, but each mile counts. Crean this after­noon has a bad attack of snow-​blindness.”

The weather on the morn­ing of Octo­ber 30 was over­cast and misty, with occa­sional falls of snow. A mod­er­ate north-​easterly breeze was blow­ing. We were still liv­ing on extra food brought from the ship when we aban­doned her, and the sledg­ing and boat­ing rations were intact. These rations would pro­vide for twenty-​eight men for fifty-​six days on full rations, but we could count on get­ting enough seal and pen­guin meat to at least dou­ble this time. We could even, if progress proved too dif­fi­cult and too inju­ri­ous to the boats, which we must guard as our ulti­mate means of sal­va­tion, camp on the near­est heavy flow, scour the neigh­bour­ing pack for pen­guins and seals, and await the out­ward drift of the pack to open and nav­i­ga­ble water.

“This plan would avoid the grave dan­gers we are now incur­ring of get­ting entan­gled in impass­able pressure-​ridges and pos­si­bly irre­triev­ably dam­ag­ing the boats, which are bound to suf­fer in rough ice; it would also min­i­mize the peril of the ice split­ting under us, as it did twice dur­ing the night at our first camp. Yet I feel sure that it is the right thing to attempt a march, since if we can make five or seven miles a day to the north-​west our chance of reach­ing safety in the months to come will be increased greatly. There is a psy­cho­log­i­cal aspect to the ques­tion also. It will be much bet­ter for the men in gen­eral to feel that, even though progress is slow, they are on their way to land than it will be sim­ply to sit down and wait for the tardy north-​westerly drift to take us out of this cruel waste of ice. We will make an attempt to move. The issue is beyond my power either to pre­dict or to control.”

That after­noon Wild and I went out in the mist and snow to find a road to the north-​east. After many devi­ous turn­ings to avoid the heav­ier pres­sure ridges, we pio­neered a way for at least a mile and a half, and then returned by a rather bet­ter route to the camp. The pres­sure was now rapid in move­ment and our floe was suf­fer­ing from the shakes and the jerks of the ice. At 3 p.m., after lunch, we got under way, leav­ing Dump Camp a mass of debris. The order was that per­sonal gear must not exceed two pounds per man, and this meant that noth­ing but bare nec­es­saries was to be taken on the march. We could not afford to cum­ber our­selves with unnec­es­sary weight. Holes had been dug in the snow for the recep­tion of pri­vate let­ters and lit­tle per­sonal tri­fles, the Lares and Penates of the mem­bers of the Expe­di­tion, and into the pri­vacy of these white graves were con­signed much of sen­ti­men­tal value and not a lit­tle of intrin­sic worth. I rather grudged the two pounds of allowance per man, owing to my keen anx­i­ety to keep weights at a min­i­mum, but some per­sonal belong­ings could fairly be regarded as indis­pens­able. The jour­ney might be a long one, and there was a pos­si­bil­ity of a win­ter in impro­vised quar­ters on an inhos­pitable coast at the other end. A man under such con­di­tions needs some­thing to occupy his thoughts, some tan­gi­ble memento of his home and peo­ple beyond the seas. So sov­er­eigns were thrown away and pho­tographs were kept. I tore the fly-​leaf out of the Bible that Queen Alexan­dra had given to the ship, with her own writ­ing in it, and also the won­der­ful page of Job con­tain­ing the verse:

Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath engen­dered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.

The other Bible, which Queen Alexan­dra had given for the use of the shore party, was down below in the lower hold in one of the cases when the ship received her death-​blow. Suit­cases were thrown away; these were retrieved later as mate­r­ial for mak­ing boots, and some of them, marked “solid leather,” proved, to our dis­ap­point­ment, to con­tain a large per­cent­age of card­board. The man­u­fac­turer would have had dif­fi­culty in con­vinc­ing us at the time that the decep­tion was any­thing short of criminal.

Sir Ernest Shack­le­ton — South: The Last Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion of Shack­le­ton and the Endurance