Holness was one of the four men not awarded the Polar Medal after the expedition. The reasons for the exclusions — Holness, Stephenson, Blackborow, and Vincent were all excluded along with McNish — are not all fully documented, and the justice of the decisions has been disputed by historians.
## The Primus Stove
There is a small domestic object at the center of the James Caird crossing that deserves more attention than it usually receives: the Primus stove.
The Primus was a portable kerosene pressure stove, invented in Sweden in the 1890s and by 1916 the standard equipment for polar expeditions. It was compact, relatively reliable, and capable of producing enough heat to cook food and melt ice in conditions where an open fire was impossible.
The six men of the James Caird lived on what the Primus could produce every four hours. They ate hot food every four hours around the clock, sixteen times in four days, sixty-four times over the course of the sixteen-day crossing. The hot food and hot drink — the recipe was seal stew and powdered milk — were not a comfort or a luxury. They were the primary mechanism by which the men’s core body temperatures were maintained against the continuous heat loss of open-boat travel in the Southern Ocean.
The cold on the James Caird was not the dramatic, photogenic cold of Antarctic blizzards but the grinding, exhausting cold of being continuously wet and continuously exposed. The waves broke over the deck constantly. The makeshift covering leaked. The sleeping bags were saturated with salt water, which prevents the insulation from working by collapsing the fibers that trap warm air. The men dried out, to the extent that they dried out, by proximity to each other in the cramped hold and by the residual heat from the Primus.