172 THE VOYAGE OF THE 'DISCOVERY' [Oct. 



last few hours some of the men had kept things going by 

 occasionally indulging in some dry remark which caused every- 

 one to laugh. Kennar's attitude had been one of grieved 

 astonishment ; presumably referring to me, he had kept repeat- 

 ing, 'If he can do it, I don't see why I can't : my legs are as 

 long as his.' 



And so it was that this party made the record march of all, 

 for they started more than a mile behind us, and must have 

 covered over thirty-seven miles in the day. 



In spite of our marching, it was a blow to be back in the 

 ship so soon after we had made our first hopeful start, and, as 

 can be imagined, I did not allow time to be wasted in pre- 

 paring to be off again. Our carpenter was soon at work 

 repairing the sledges with all the assistance that could be 

 afforded him. Meanwhile I saw that it would be necessary to 

 reorganise our arrangements. Without going into the reasons 

 which guided me, I may say that I now thought the best 

 scheme was for the advance party to start off on its own 

 account, to pick up the glacier provisions, and to dispose of 

 them on a new plan. I arranged that Ferrar should start with 

 a small sledge of his own, and should be entirely indepen- 

 dent ; but as he signified his wish to remain with us as long as 

 possible, it was still a party of nine that started out on October 

 26, five days after our flying return. Our material for repair- 

 ing sledges was very scanty, but at length out of the parts of 

 various broken ones we had succeeded in producing one sound 

 eleven-foot sledge for our own party and a short seven-foot one 

 for Ferrar's glacier work. 



With these we once more started to cross the long stretch 

 of sea-ice to the mainland. The night of the 27 th found us at 

 the end of the glacier tongue, and I wrote : ' We can fairly 

 claim to be in good marching condition, having crossed the 

 strait at an average of over twenty-five miles a day. This 

 morning we met a small group of Emperor penguins; they 

 were going south towards the " Eskers," for what reason one 

 cannot guess, travelling on their breasts and propelling them- 

 selves with their powerful feet at a speed of at least five miles 



