4 EDWARD A. WILSON. 



while the ship was beset with uew ice, we first began to suspect that we were Hearing 

 the Emperor's breeding haunts. Away in the distance, over some miles of disintegra- 

 ting ice-floe, could be seen large companies of birds which, when viewed through the 

 telescope from the crow's nest, proved to be Emperor Penguins. Large and dark, 

 standing in colonies here and there under stranded icebergs, were many hundreds of 

 them, and between them and us, in the water and on the ice, now crying aloud to one 

 another, now leaping like salmon to land upright on the edges of the floe, were such 

 numbers as had never before been seen together. Knowing nothing of their habits, it 

 was natural that we should believe that here at last was the lona-looked-for breeding 

 ground ; and our disappointment, on realising that we could not attempt to reach it, 

 may be easily imagined. 



The navigable season was already at its close, the sea ice was freezing hourly 

 thicker, the miles of disintegrating ice between ourselves and the apparent rookery was 

 a barrier to closer intercourse, and the near approach of winter made it imperative that 

 we should speedily find winter quarters and avoid by all possible means being frozen 

 in exactly where we were. So the question for the time remained unsolved. When, 

 nine months later, we discovered that the Emperor Penguin lays and incubates its egg 

 through the winter darkness ; that the chicken emerges from the egg at the beginning 

 of September ; that it has shed its down and taken up an existence, independent of 

 its parents, l)y the middle of January, we began to wonder whether, after all, the 

 collection of birds in King Edward VII.'s Land was, in truth, a breeding colony, or 

 whether it was not rather a large collection of moulting birds, waiting on fast ice till 

 their new plumage had appeared and they might be able to take to water once again. 



This, no doubt, was the true explanation of our seeing birds in such numbers at so 

 late a date as January 31st aud so far south as lat. 76°. To retm'n, however, to our 

 search for their breeding-place. We had settled into McMurdo Sound for the winter 

 after returning westward from King Edward VIL's Land along the Barrier Cliff. Again, 

 we had passed the little bay under the clifl's of Cape Crozier, and quite close by in the 

 middle of a very extensive rookery of Adelie Penguins we had left a record for the 

 relief ship ' Morning ' to pick up in the ensuing year. And then, when our first dark 

 winter lay behind us, the spring sledging was begun, and with it preparations were 

 completed for the longer extended journeys that were to occupy the summer months. 



A few days only before Captain Scott started on his long Southern sledge journey, 

 taking with him Lieutenant Shackleton and myself, three frozen chickens were brought 

 to the ship from the Emperor Penguin rookery, discovered then for the first time at 

 Cape Crozier by Lieutenants Royds and Skelton. Having skinned these birds, and 

 having heard a most interesting account from Lieutenant Skelton, who had brought 

 home the minutest details, we had at once to leave the ship for the South. All further 

 investigation on my part was therefore necessarily postponed till the following year, but 

 Lieutenant Royds kindly volunteered to make a second journey to the spot and hunt 

 more rigorously for eggs, and, if possible, find answers to quite a number of questions 



