Shackleton.

The end of the Endurance:

“This evening, as we were lying in our tents we heard the Boss call out, ‘She’s going, boys!'”

“She went down bows first, her stern raised in the air. She then gave one quick dive and the ice closed over her forever.”

“It gave one a sickening sensation to see it, for, mastless and useless as she was, she seemed to be a link with the outer world.”

“No one said much, but we cannot be blamed for feeling it in a sentimental way.”

“When one knows every little nook and corner of one’s ship as we did, and has helped her time and again in the fight that she made so well, the actual parting was not without its pathos, quite apart from one’s own desolation.”

“She put up the bravest fight that ever ship had fought before yielding… Nothing is now visible of her but 20 feet of her stern pointing pitifully up to Heaven. She remains like this a few minutes & then slowly slips down beneath her icy shroud & is seen no more… At 5 p.m. we saw her end.”
— Frank Worsley

“We are not sorry to see the last of the wreck, for it was an object of depression to all who turned their eyes in that direction.”
— Frank Hurley

Unattributed quotes either by Shackleton or quoted by him from the mens’ diaries.

“We found no seals. So for diversion we got on a small piece of ice, and shoved out into the lead, paddling ourselves along with ski sticks. We were just like a couple of schoolboys doing a stupid thing just for devilment. Sir E. saw us, and I personally had the feeling of a schoolboy caught stealing apples.

“We immediately paddled for the bank and landed and went on with our seal hunt, finally meeting him as he returned to camp. Instead of the long harangue as we expected he only gave us an awful look and passed on.”

— Alexander Macklin

“Waking on a fine morning I feel a great longing for the smell of dewy wet grass and flowers of a Spring morning in New Zealand or England. One has very few other longings for civilization — good bread and butter, Munich beer, Coromandel rock oysters, apple pie and Devonshire cream are pleasant reminiscences rather than longings.”

— Frank Worsley

“In order to know very minutely the differences and resemblances between all the kinds or species of one group of living things Darwin studied for eight years the “cirrhipedes,” the name give to the sea-acorns and ships’ barnacles which occur in all parts of the world, some living on rocks, some on the backs of turtles, others on whales, on the feet of birds, on bits of floating wood or of pumice-stone, and some on one another! They are all hermaphrodites, but Darwin found in several a most singular thing, namely, the existence of minute males, complemental to and parasitic on the hermaphrodites. His discovery was doubted and denied, but he had the pleasure of seeing it at last fully confirmed thirty years after his book on cirrhipedes was published.”

-from Science from an Easy Chair, by Sir E. Ray Lankester, 1910, pp. 23-4.

Home Thoughts, From Abroad

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

by Robert Browning

On the Sea

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often ’tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it sometime fell.
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
Oh, ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody—
Sit ye near some old Cavern’s Mouth and brood,
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired!

by John Keats