However, their base camp was cut off from the continent's interior by high mountain ranges, and journeys along the coastline were frustrated by unsafe sea ice.
The men, frostbitten and exhausted, reached the old Discovery expedition hut at Hut Point on 24 March, but were cut off from the ship and from their Cape Evans base by unsafe sea ice, and had to wait there, idle, for nearly three months.
Skeptics abounded: an editorial in a sailing magazine called it "unsafe on any sea".
The government claims the offshore camps have helped to remove the financial incentive for people smugglers, in the process saving hundreds of lives that might otherwise have been lost at sea in unsafe boats.
Thomas de Maizière, the German interior minister and chancellor Angela Merkel's former chief of staff, also takes a hard line, arguing, like May, that more ambitious European search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean will act as a "pull factor", encouraging smugglers to send more migrants to sea in unsafe, packed vessels.
He has not been forced to cross the sea in an unsafe boat to escape civil war.
"The high points of the stage and particularly Blackpool on the sea front is unsafe, unfortunately".
Apart from possible deaths at sea caused by unsafe boats, those unable to pay the traffickers faced violence, abuse and some may have been murdered.
Surely this renders the assumption that the seabed is naturally lifeless unsafe – to say the least?
"If Summer had been told she shouldn't go into the sea because it was unsafe there's no way she'd have been there," said her mother, Sarah, a 48-year-old history teacher.
