Ernest Holness, one of the firemen, nearly drowned on the night of February 9, 1916, when the floe cracked directly beneath his sleeping bag and he slid into the open water. Shackleton was close enough to grab him before he went under. This was the closest the expedition came to losing anyone during the long drift, and the fact that it didn’t was in some part a matter of seconds.
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## Seven Days in Open Boats
By early April 1916, the sea ice was breaking up. On April 9, Shackleton ordered the boats launched into the icy, heaving sea. All 28 men were distributed among the three lifeboats and pushed off into open water for the first time in 497 days.
The boats were 22 feet, 20 feet, and 18 feet long respectively. They were not designed for open-ocean sailing. The crew was exhausted after 15 months on the ice, suffering from the effects of cold and inadequate nutrition. The sea they were sailing into is called, without exaggeration, one of the most dangerous on earth.
They rowed and sailed for seven days. The cold was such that the spray froze on the boats as it hit them, and the men had to chip ice from the gunwales to keep the boats from swamping. They slept, when they could sleep at all, huddled against each other in the cramped hulls. Fresh water ran short. The sun didn’t appear for navigational readings; Worsley navigated by dead reckoning through the overcast.
The smallest boat, the Stancomb Wills, shipped so much water that its crew had to bail continuously. The James Caird, the largest boat, had been modified by McNish to provide some protection against the sea, and its six-man crew fared marginally better than the others. Still, by the time they sighted Elephant Island on April 14, the men in all three boats were in serious trouble. Rickinson’s heart was failing. Blackborow’s feet were already showing signs of frostbite. Several men were delirious.