After living on the ice for two months, the crew sailed their lifeboats to the small and barren Elephant Island, before risking their lives navigating a further 800 nautical miles to the South Georgia whaling stations to find help.
It was all over, there was nobody left to listen, and all sensible folk were scrambling to the lifeboats – but those musicians, slaves to duty that they were, kept on sawing away at their violins and harpsichords.
When eventually the floes began to break up in April 1916, Shackleton loaded his men into three small lifeboats and struck out for Elephant Island, an uninhabited speck of land some 100 miles distant.Back on terra firma after 497 days adrift, the ragged crew found their new environment as brutally inhospitable as the drifting floes.
Only two of the ship's 46 lifeboats were deployed.
All are stowed in the white steel hull of the 30-metre-long good ship Sinai and around her engine and in the stairways and under the lifeboats and in the lifeboats; every surface is covered with bags, parcels and boxes.When Sudan approaches, after a cold night under the stars on deck, the men roll up blankets and their wives braid the hair of young daughters.
Though there were lifeboats aplenty the lesson of the Titanic was well learned most were unlaunchable because of the ship's sudden list, made worse as water poured through lower-deck portholes, opened for air despite earlier orders to close them.
Diplomats in Brussels recall an occasion when Britain was seeking to ease emissions rules for tractors that haul lifeboats up British beaches.
They improvised a communal hut by overturning the three lifeboats.
That could explain the story that a number of them tried to hide from the helicopters and lifeboats that were trying to save them.Yet the middlemen are not the fundamental cause of the tragedy.
Not all the ships have the covered lifeboats recommended for polar conditions.
Britain's lifeboats are run by volunteers, which suggests there is public spirit about.
