On April 15, 1916, all 28 men landed on Elephant Island. It was the first solid ground any of them had stood on in 497 days. By several accounts, some of the men simply picked up handfuls of rocks and held them. One man fell to his knees and kissed the shore. The ground felt unsteady to men who had spent nearly a year and a half on moving ice.
Elephant Island is not a hospitable place. It is a small, mountainous island off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, exposed to the full force of the Southern Ocean weather, inhabited by penguins and elephant seals but nothing else. There were no humans within 800 miles in any direction. No ship would look for them here. There was no way to signal for help.
Shackleton looked at what he had and made the calculation that the only way to save the men on Elephant Island was for a small party to get help from somewhere else. The only somewhere else within reach was South Georgia, where the whaling stations were inhabited year-round. South Georgia was 800 nautical miles to the northeast. The route crossed the Drake Passage and the Scotia Sea, two of the most storm-prone stretches of water in the world.
He would take the largest boat.
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## The James Caird
The James Caird was 22 feet, 6 inches long and 6 feet wide. McNish had modified it during the ice drift to give it some capability for open-ocean passage: a makeshift deck of salvaged wood and canvas covered most of the hull, and a ballast of stones from the beach gave it more stability in heavy seas. It was not a vessel anyone would choose for an 800-mile open-ocean crossing in the Southern Ocean. It was the vessel they had.