“I am not very susceptible to emotion, but this happy reunion with our comrades, whom we had almost given up as lost and our unhappy release, with the lonely peaks like mute sentinels witnessing our departure has left an indelible impression… Oh! the bliss of once more feeling the motion of the sea, the music of fresh though foreign voices and to sense at last that our anxieties and privations are ended.”

“I lay on the floor wrapped in a blanket meditating and thinking how ineffably more pleasing to be kept awake by the throb of the engines that are hurrying us back to life, than like smoldering logs on Elephant Isle, harking to the stentorious snores that ebbed away our existence.”

— Frank Hurley