By February 22, 1915, the ship had drifted to its furthest south point, at 77 degrees south, 35 degrees west, carried by the current of the ice pack. Then the drift turned north, carrying them away from the continent they had come to cross. This was not liberation: the ice was still locked around the ship, and the drift was taking them further from any possible escape. They were being carried like a pebble in a glacier.
The months passed. The Antarctic winter descended and the sun disappeared. The men settled into the long darkness. Shackleton maintained the routines of the ship — mealtimes, duties, entertainments — with a deliberateness that was itself a form of management. He understood, as those who have written about him have observed, that the interior life of a confined and frightened group of people needed tending as carefully as the ship’s mechanical systems. He played cards. He talked to his men. He managed the tensions and grievances that inevitably developed in a group of 28 people living on top of each other in a ship surrounded by ice.
The winter passed. The spring came. The ice did not release them.
—
## The Pressure Builds
The Weddell Sea ice is not static. It moves with currents and wind, and as it moves, floes press against each other and build pressure that has to go somewhere. In the summer of 1915, that pressure went into the hull of the Endurance.
On July 16, the pack began to fragment. The floes that had held the ship peacefully through the winter were now in motion, pressing against each other and against the hull. The ship was struck repeatedly, jolted from different directions as the ice moved. Shackleton recorded that the hull groaned and trembled with each impact.