The resting place on South Georgia — the island he had crossed on foot in thirty-six hours in 1916, with Worsley and Crean, in the days when the 22 men on Elephant Island were still waiting — is part of what makes his story so spatially coherent. He had spent his adult life moving toward the south pole and never quite reached it. He had crossed the wildest stretch of ocean on earth in a small wooden boat. He had walked across mountains that no one had crossed before. He died at the island where his most extraordinary journey had ended, and he is buried there now, in a cemetery above the harbor at Grytviken, with the ocean he spent his life sailing visible from the grave.
Worsley died in 1943, at 72, having served as a naval commander in two world wars and continued writing about the Endurance. His account of the James Caird voyage, Endurance: An Epic of Polar Adventure, published in 1931, provides the most technically detailed narrative of the crossing from the perspective of the man who navigated it.
Crean retired to Kerry after the war and said very little, publicly, about his Antarctic experiences. He had been with Scott on two expeditions and with Shackleton on two more, and he had seen things that were not easily translated into pub conversation. The South Pole Inn, the pub he ran in Annascaul until his death in 1938, does not appear to have been a place where he told Antarctic stories. He let the expeditions recede into the past and lived quietly. He is remembered in Kerry primarily as someone from there who did something extraordinary elsewhere, which is a fate that would have suited him.