He smashed them on the ice. He did not leave them in their cases, did not seal them in the ship, did not attempt to preserve them in any way. He smashed them because he understood that if he didn’t, he would change his mind. He would want to go back and rescue one more, and then another, and the process of selection would become undoable.
The 120-odd plates he kept are the visual record of the first fourteen months of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. They include the images that have become iconic: the Endurance frozen in the ice, the ship listing as the pressure builds, the crew playing football on the ice floe in the Antarctic winter. They include scientific documentation of ice conditions that is still referenced in polar research. They include portraits of individual crew members that are the only surviving images of most of them.
The plates Hurley smashed — the ones he chose not to keep — are gone. We know only that there were more than 280 of them, and that they contained images Hurley himself judged inferior to the ones he saved. Given the quality of what he saved, it is possible to imagine what was lost.
For the rest of the ordeal, he used a Kodak Vest Pocket camera — a folding camera the size of a large book, designed for amateur use. He had three rolls of film. He used them carefully, on Elephant Island and during the rescue. The images he made with that small camera in those conditions are technically less accomplished than the glass-plate work but no less important: they are the documentation of survival, of the men who had come through, of the moment of rescue.