The consequence of missing South Georgia was, as Worsley had calculated, arriving approximately at the coast of South Africa. Three thousand additional miles of open ocean lay between South Georgia and the nearest alternative landfall. Missing South Georgia was not a survivable error.
They didn’t miss it. On May 8, they sighted land. On May 10, 1916, in hurricane conditions, the James Caird entered King Haakon Bay on the southern coast of South Georgia. They had been at sea for 16 days. The four surviving members of the shore party who had been left behind on the king Haakon Bay side — McCarthy, Vincent, and McNish among them — were in rough shape. McCarthy and Vincent were sick. McNish, who would later be denied the Polar Medal because of the dispute over his authority challenge during the ice drift, was not well either.
The whaling station at Stromness was on the other side of the island.
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## Thirty-Six Hours Across South Georgia
Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean were the three who were fit enough to make the crossing. They left the others at King Haakon Bay in the care of McNish and set out with three days’ provisions, the Endurance ship’s log, and a length of rope. They had no map of the interior. No one had ever crossed South Georgia on foot. The island’s mountainous spine — a chaos of peaks, glaciers, and crevasses — had never been traversed.
They started at 3 a.m. on May 19, 1916.
The terrain was what it was: two snowfields, four glaciers, and three mountain ranges in approximately 40 miles. They climbed by starlight and descended by daylight, and when the darkness made the footing impossible they sat down and waited for the light to improve. At one point, descending a long slope they couldn’t get around, they sat down on the rope — all three together, Shackleton in the lead, Crean behind him, Worsley at the rear, arms around each other’s waists — and slid 1,500 feet in two minutes, landing in soft snow. Later they waded through a snow-covered lake they had not seen from above. Near the end, they came to a waterfall and descended it one at a time on the rope, freezing and exhausted, Crean going first because he was the heaviest.