Passengers of the Canadian cruise ship M/S Explorer are helped by Chilean Air Force personnel Friday as they arrive to Fildes Bay on King George Island, Antarctica, after being rescued from their ship after it struck submerged ice and began to sink. No injuries were reported, although all 154 tourists and crew endured subfreezing temperatures while awaiting rescue.

Buenos Aires, Argentina ? Nearly 40 hours after abandoning a sinking cruise ship in icy waters near Antarctica, the passengers of the M/S Explorer were flown to Chile on Saturday night to begin their journeys home.

Poor wind conditions had delayed their flights aboard military aircraft, but a plane carrying 80 of the passengers arrived in the southern Chilean city of Punta Arenas at 7:30 p.m. A second flight with the remaining passengers was expected to arrive later in the evening.

While they waited for their flights, some of the 154 passengers and crew members were able to briefly use satellite telephones, providing vivid snapshots of an adventure vacation that none of them are likely to forget.

“Well, he didn’t sound very good, actually,” Mandy Flood, of the Isles of Scilly, said after speaking to her husband, Bob, a bird-watching guide who was aboard the Explorer. “Obviously, the rescue boats took quite awhile to get to them, so they were all pretty cold and exhausted.”

The trouble started at the end of the 12th day of a 19-day cruise. Some of the passengers were snoozing in their cabins and others were sharing drinks at the bar as the ship neared the South Shetland Islands. Around 11:30 p.m., Capt. Bengt Wiman said he felt a buckle that did not feel quite right.

“At first I thought that we had collided with a whale,” said Wiman, who spoke Saturday via satellite phone with media in his home country of Sweden.

But a short time later, a crew member informed him that water was entering the ship. The crew quickly found the leak, a hole slightly larger than a fist that was made by submerged ice, he said.

Andrea Salas, an Argentine crew member, said she was in the bar with colleagues and passengers when someone came in and yelled, “There’s water!” After being briefed by Wiman, the passengers noticed that the ship began to list toward its starboard side as water filled the decks below.

The electricity eventually cut out, and the passengers boarded lifeboats and rafts around 3 a.m. Few showed signs of worry, and some even cracked jokes about the Titanic, Flood said.

“We were surprised because it was peaceful and a behavior that was very good among passengers, who didn’t panic and who were very controlled the whole time,” Salas said in a satellite telephone conversation, according to the Buenos Aires newspaper, Clarin.

But some of the passengers grew cold and weary after spending hours in rafts and lifeboats until being rescued by the Nordnorge, a Norwegian cruise liner.

Officials said that six passengers were treated for mild hypothermia, the Chilean newspaper La Tercera reported Saturday.

A spokesman for G.A.P. Adventures, which owned the Explorer, said Saturday that upon landing in Punta Arenas, a city at the southern tip of mainland Chile, the passengers would be given the option of joining another cruise or flying home.