The shelter was two lifeboats turned upside down and set on stone walls, with the gunwales sealed by tent canvas weighted with rocks. The space held 22 men. Hurley described the conditions as “snugly though sardiniuosly.” It was dark in the Antarctic winter, cold, cramped, and permeated with the smell of seal blubber, which was their primary fuel. The men wore their same clothes for weeks at a time. Reindeer hair from their disintegrating sleeping bags worked its way into everything — their food, their hair, their beards.
They hunted. Penguins and elephant seals were their primary food. Without the animals available on Elephant Island — which is a rookery and as such had abundant wildlife — they would not have survived. Their initial supplies of sledging rations and biscuits ran out and were not replaced by anything brought from the outside. Everything they ate after the first weeks came from the island itself.
Wild rationed the supplies with scrupulous fairness. He maintained the social routines: meals were served, cards were played, the salvaged volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica were read aloud. On Saturday evenings they mixed a tablespoon of methylated spirits — their stove fuel, measured out carefully — with sugar and raised it as a toast to sweethearts and wives. Hussey played the banjo. The men sang.
Percy Blackborow’s feet deteriorated through the months of cold and damp. By late June, the frostbite had progressed to gangrene, and the expedition’s two surgeons, Alexander Macklin and James McIlroy, amputated all the toes on his left foot using the cramped hut as an operating theater. Blackborow was nineteen years old. He healed.