Part IV Summary and Analysis

Part IV consists of five enumerated chapters. In brief, it details how the men travel some 140 nautical miles in three tiny open boats through the most dangerous sea on earth to make an unlikely but successful landfall on tiny Elephant Island, a rocky and inhospitable chunk of rock in the South Sea. During this portion of the text the men suffer the most-extreme hardships of the entire expedition.

Shortly after abandoning Patience Camp the three tiny open craft—each about twenty-two feet in length and six feet in beam encounter a tide rip and are nearly overtaken by a tumbling, agitated mass of ice and water. They spend the first night tied off to a small floe but conditions are so dangerous that Shackleton decides to spend future nights in the boats if at all possible. A second...