Ernest Henry Shackleton. The British Antarctic Expedition 1907–1909.

“Well-designed plans for polar research often become unworkable. So this plan of ours, as we learned a little later, turned out to be completely impossible. Over the next 36 hours, we had to abandon our second intention - to winter on barrier ice. We were sailing along the ice wall and close to it. According to the map, we should have been opposite the aisle at 6 a.m., but there were no signs of it in the wall. At one o’clock in the morning, we passed Borkhgrevinka Bay, at 20 o’clock the barrier passage was already far behind. However, this passage disappeared, apparently because pieces were split off for many miles from the ice wall and, in the end, there remained a vast bay that connected to the Borchgrevink passage and formed what we now called the Whale Bay. It was a huge disappointment for us, but at the same time, we were grateful to the fate that the Great Barrier had broken off here before we settled on it. Of course, there was nothing good in the fact that the place where we hoped to find a haven disappeared from the face of the earth, but at the same time, we, its alleged inhabitants, remained unharmed on board the ship. It would be much worse if we had time to land here, and then the ship, coming back for us, would not have found anything. Thoughts about what could happen if we wintered in the Barrier made me to a firm decision not to winter on the ice, but to look for a wintering place on solid rocky soil.

We had two options, I decided to choose the second and immediately go to the Land of King Edward VII. At 8 a.m. on January 24, we rounded the corner of the ice wall, which was eight hundred meters back, and continued on our way east. The coastline here bends at a right angle. At the top of this corner, there is an ice slope descending to the sea, but it was too steep and too cut up with cracks to climb it and explore the surroundings if we landed here.

We moored to a large ice floe. I went down to the cabin to Captain England to discuss the situation. In a place where the ship was, there were relatively few ice floes, but outside there was continuous drifting ice and several huge icebergs among it. The only way out is to stay near the ice wall: between it and the edge of the drifting ice, a strip of clear water was visible. Four individual observers accurately determined longitude. Then the calculations showed not only that we are already east of the place where the Barrier passage is indicated on the map, but also that the ice wall of the Barrier has strongly receded here since January 1902.”