186 SCOTT'S. (LAST (EXPEDITION. [January 
So little Blackie reigned supreme 
Until one day when he was fed 
By the kind and humane leader, 
Foster father, foster feeder, 
On rich and tasty lumps of blubber 
His little tummy stretched like rubber, 
Stretched too much . . . and now he’s dead. 
The skuas are the most quarrelsome birds I know. They 
would fight for hours over the carcase of a freshly killed seal 
before they realised there was enough food for ten times as 
many skuas—and by this time the flesh would be frozen so hard 
they could make no impression on it. The penguins have their 
own peculiar propensities, while the seals used to amaze us by 
their callousness. The day after we reached Cape Roberts we 
killed a large seal and cut it up while another twenty yards away 
watched us quite casually and did not budge for hours. 
There was nothing much to do on the cape. It was triangular 
in shape, and about half a mile long. It rose about 50 feet above 
the sea ice. The broad base of the triangle was covered with 
snow which gradually merged into the Piedmont Glacier. There 
was no ice wall here, so that the glacier was presumably stag- 
nant at this corner. The great granite tors of the cape were 
all flattened, showing that they had been planed off by a 
former extension of the ice sheet. Debenham spent some time 
making a detailed plane table survey. I fixed several theodolite 
stations, but as the days went by our life settled into a monoto- 
nous round. 
I cut the meals down to two a day. We had plenty of seal 
meat and biscuit, but all the other stores were approaching their 
last week. 
We used to have supper about 7 P.M. Every other day it 
consisted of a half ration of pemmican—for though seal meat 
is not so black as it’s painted (and it’s very black indeed), yet 
we had eaten little else for a month, and were all heartily sick 
of it. ‘Then we turned in and used to yarn or read till about 
3 A.M., when we managed to get to sleep. We turned out at 
noon and had a biscuit and seal lunch. During the afternoon we 
used to walk over the cape and inspect the cracks in the sea ice. 
One man was kept fairly busy cutting up seal meat, while the 
cook coaxed the stove to cook the fry. 
