i9"l LEAKAGE OF OIL 237 



One Ton Depot, coming up five and three-quarters miles to it. 

 I decided to give men and animals a half day's rest here. It was 

 a beautiful sunny and bright day but with some wind. Here 

 we found the stores which had been left by Demetri and Cherry- 

 Garrard. One of the tins of paraffin on top of the cairns had 

 leaked and spoilt some of the stores placed at the foot of the 

 camp. There was no hole of any kind in this tin. 



Our progress up to this point had been made in one day and 

 a half less time than it had taken us on the previous year and 

 that was with the mules drawing full loads for the whole of the 

 time. There was no doubt that our surface had been infinitely 

 better than in the previous season. Everything was favourable 

 and the health of men and animals was splendid. 



On the night of the nth and morning of the I2th, after we 

 had marched eleven miles due south of One Ton, we found the 

 tent. It was an object partially snowed up and looking like a 

 cairn. Before it were the ski sticks and in front of them a bam- 

 boo which probably was the mast of the sledge. The tent was 

 practically on the line of cairns which we had built in the previous 

 season. It was within a quarter of a mile of the remains of the 

 cairn, which showed as a small hummock beneath the snow. 



Inside the tent were the bodies of Captain Scott, Doctor Wil- 

 son, and Lieutenant Bowers. They had pitched their tent well, 

 and it had withstood all the blizzards of an exceptionally hard 

 winter. Each man of the expedition recognised the bodies. 

 From Captain Scott's diary I found his reasons for this disas- 

 ter. When the men had been assembled I read to them these 

 reasons, the place of death of Petty Officer Evans and the story 

 of Captain Gates' heroic end. 



We recovered all their gear and dug out the sledge with 

 their belongings on it. Amongst these were 35 Ibs. of very im- 

 portant geological specimens which had been collected on the 

 moraines of the Beardmore Glacier; at Doctor Wilson's request 

 they had stuck to these up to the very end, even when disaster 

 stared them in the face and they knew that the specimens were 

 so much weight added to what they had to pull. 



When everything had been gathered up, we covered them 

 with the outer tent and read the burial service. From this time 

 until well into the next day we started to build a mighty cairn 

 above them. This cairn was finished the next morning, and upon 



