“…life was reckoned in periods of a few hours, or possibly only a few minutes—an endless succession of trials leading to deliverance from the particular hell of the moment.

“…within each watch there were a number of subdivisions: the time at the helm—eighty eonic minutes…

“Again and again the cycle was repeated until the body and the mind arrived at a state of numbness in which the frenzied antics of the boat, the perpetual cold and wet came to be accepted almost as normal.”

— Alfred Lansing, Endurance