At 7 a.m. on May 20, they heard the sound of a steam whistle from somewhere below them. It was the shift-change whistle from the Stromness whaling station — a mundane signal from an ordinary working day that was, to three men who had been in the Antarctic wilderness for seventeen months, something else entirely.
“Never had any one of us heard sweeter music,” Shackleton wrote.
They reached Stromness later that morning, May 20, 1916. The manager, Petter Sørlle, had known Shackleton before the expedition departed. He did not recognize the three filthy, ragged men who appeared at his door. When Shackleton identified himself, Sørlle and the Norwegian whalers who worked there — hardened men who spent their lives in difficult waters — reportedly wept.
The three men had their first hot bath in nearly two years, their first fresh clothes, their first proper meal. Worsley, in less time than it took the others to clean up, went back around the island with a whaling vessel to retrieve McNish, McCarthy, and Vincent from King Haakon Bay.
Now there were 25 men accounted for. The 22 waiting on Elephant Island still did not know whether anyone was coming for them.
—
## Frank Wild’s Four Months
Frank Wild was perhaps uniquely qualified for the task of keeping 22 men alive and sane through four months of Antarctic winter without any knowledge of whether rescue was possible.
He had survived enough difficult situations to know that survival operates day by day. You don’t survive a month of Antarctic winter. You survive today, and then tomorrow, and then the day after. He organized the men at Elephant Island on this principle, setting up routines that gave each day a structure independent of what might or might not be happening 800 miles away.