“Monotony in the meals, even considering the circumstances in which we found ourselves, was what I was striving to avoid, so our little stock of luxuries, such as fish paste, tinned herrings, etc., was carefully husbanded and so distributed as to last as long as possible.

“A few boxes of army biscuits soaked with sea water were distributed at one meal. They were in such a state that they would not have been looked at a second time under ordinary circumstances, but to us on a floating lump of ice, over three hundred miles from land, and that quite hypothetical, and with the unplumbed sea beneath us, they were luxuries indeed. Wild’s tent made a pudding of theirs with some dripping.”

— Ernest Shackleton, South