The entry in a long-lost diary for November 20 1915 insisted "all cheerful" - which if true was remarkable. Film director Charles Sturridge's hands were shaking as he read it.
The diary was originally intended as a key document for a film, Sturridge's account of Sir Ernest Shackleton's extraordinary Endurance expedition - which remains one of the most remarkable exploits in the history of polar exploration. It stars Kenneth Branagh as Shackleton and will be shown on Channel 4 in two episodes over the new year holiday.
Sturridge spent years trying to track down Shackleton's account of the expedition, but gave up, believing it had been destroyed. By the time it resurfaced in the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, unpublicised due to a protracted dispute over ownership, he had completed his film.
He had read dozens of other diaries and journals of the crew, in the years spent researching, writing and filming his account of the expedition, which was launched as war broke out in 1914.
Shackleton - who had been sent back on health grounds from Scott's doomed attempt to reach the South Pole - planned to make the first crossing of the of the south polar land mass. Instead, his crew spent eight months trapped in ice, then months on the ice and dragging their three lifeboats to clear water, followed by a 90-mile voyage to uninhabited Elephant Island.
Shackleton then took the strongest boat, the tiny James Caird, and five men, and rowed 800 miles across open sea to get help from the whaling stations of South Georgia - still regarded as the greatest feat of open boat navigation and endurance. They landed on the wrong side, so with two companions, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean, he climbed the unmapped mountains of the interior in an 18-hour forced march. All his crew survived.
Kenneth Branagh accepted the part of the charming, charismatic, womanising Shackleton as soon as he learned they would be filming on ice. One of the most spectacular scenes had to be done without rehearsal: Shackleton's decision that the quickest way from the mountain down to the whaling station was to slide. Branagh, who made the slide with Mark McGann and Kevin McNally, as Crean and Worsley, said it felt like "going over the top of Beachy Head in a toboggan".
One crucial difference was that filming was off Greenland, comparatively close to rescue if needed. Sturridge considered the extraordinary distances and dangers of the Antarctic and decided not to go there.
Diaries were an important part of the original expedition. Shackleton, ever strapped for cash, had pre-sold the media rights to the Daily Chronicle. Every member of the crew, down to the ship's cook, was contracted to keep a journal, and to hand them over at the end of the voyage.
Only Shackleton's account had apparently disappeared. It was known to have existed in the 1950s, when a few lines were quoted in a biography, but then vanished. When he had finished the script, but before filming, Sturridge learned that it was left by Shackleton's daughter Cecily to her cousin Rena Dodds and only resurfaced when she died in 1999.
Her executors proposed to sell, but the Shackleton family disputed that it was ever Cecily's property to leave. By the time the legal row was resolved, and the diary made available among the archives at the Scott institute, the film was complete.
He turned nervously to his hero's own account of one of the crucial episodes, wondering if Shackleton's version would explode his own interpretation.
"There certainly was a degree of trepidation when I was reading it," Sturridge said, "but what is remarkable about the diary is how little it says. It is terse in the extreme, like a ship's log. The characteristic entry, repeated time and again, is 'no news, all cheerful'."
The events of November 20 had been sensational. Shackleton and his crew had spent eight months trapped on board Discovery in pack ice, before abandoning it to set up camp when the expanding ice threatened to crush it.
Shackleton's account of the day was far less evocative than what Sturridge had filmed, the men witnessing the utter destruction of their best hope of survival.
"She went today. I was standing by H's sledge at 4.50 saw the funnel dip behind a hummock suddenly - ran up the lookout at 5pm she went down by the bow. The stern the cause of all the trouble was the last to go under water. I cannot write about it... Sunday always seems to be the day on which things happen to us. All cheerful. Cut a ventilation in galley it was so hot."
Sturridge was drawn to the project because he found Shackleton's humanity, his common touch, more attractive than Scott's buttoned-up heroism. Only the last entry, he felt, gave a hint of the man's true character - "I recognised immediately the man that we had spent the preceding months trying to capture on film."
It was a letter, dated April 23 1916, written on Elephant Island, to Frank Wild, his friend and second in command, a mixture of sentiment and dogged practicality.
"Dear Sir, In the event of my not surviving the boat journey to South Georgia you will do your best for the rescue of the party. You are in full command from the time the boat leaves the island, and all hands are under your orders. On your return to England you are to communicate with the committee. I wish you, Lees and Hurley, to write the book. You watch my interest. In other letters you will find the terms as agreed for lecturing. You to do England Great Britain and Continent, Hurley the USA. I have every confidence in you and always have had. May God prosper your work and your life. You can carry my love to my people and say I tried my best. Yours sincerely, E H Shackleton."
