The James Caird rounded the point of Elephant Island and disappeared into the open sea. The men on the shore kept watching after the boat was out of sight, which is a thing people do when they have nothing left to watch but cannot bring themselves to turn away from the place the disappearance happened.
Then they turned away. Wild called them to the work of establishing the permanent camp.
## The Sound of the Whistle
At seven in the morning on May 20, 1916, Frank Worsley was partway down a snow slope on South Georgia Island when he heard a sound.
It was faint. The wind and the altitude and the forty-eight-plus hours of continuous effort they had been through since leaving King Haakon Bay had worn down his ability to distinguish sounds from the general noise of wind and snow. But it was not wind. It was mechanical. It was regular.
It was a steam whistle.
The Stromness whaling station used a steam whistle to signal the start of the working day. The specific whistle they heard, at seven in the morning, was the shift-change signal for the whaling crews beginning their day’s work. It was, in the ordinary sense, the most mundane possible sound — a factory whistle, a routine announcement that the workday was starting, the same sound that had been made at the same time every working morning for years.
For three men who had been in the Antarctic wilderness for seventeen months, it was something else.