348 THE VOYAGE OF THE " FRAM " 



morning the commander of the Kainan Maru, whose 

 name was Homura, came on board. The same day a 

 tent was set up on the edge of the Barrier, and cases, 

 sledges, and so on, were put out on the ice. Kainan 

 Maru means, I have been told, "the ship that opens 

 the South." 



Prestrud and I went on board her later in the day, to 

 see what she was like, but we met neither the leader of 

 the expedition nor the captain of the ship. Prestrud 

 had the cinematograph apparatus with him, and a lot of 

 photographs were also taken. 



The leader of the Japanese expedition has written 

 somewhere or other that the reason of Shackleton's 

 losing all his ponies was that the ponies were not kept 

 in tents at night, but had to lie outside. He thought 

 the ponies ought to be in the tents and the men outside. 

 From this one would think they were great lovers of 

 animals, but I must confess that was not the impression 

 I received. They had put penguins into little boxes to 

 take them alive to Japan ! Round about the deck lay 

 dead and half -dead skua gulls in heaps. On the ice 

 close to the vessel was a seal ripped open, with part of 

 its entrails on the ice; but the seal was still alive. 

 Neither Prestrud nor I had any sort of weapon that we 

 could kill the seal with, so we asked the Japanese to do 

 it, but they only grinned and laughed. A little way off 

 two of them were coming across the ice with a seal in 

 front of them; they drove it on with two long poles. 



