402 THE VOYAGE OF THE 'DISCOVERY' [Oct. 



productive. The wardroom skylight does not make a very 

 large garden, but enough cress has been produced for one good 

 feed for all hands.' 



' October '19. — The weather conditions have not been too 

 favourable to our changes, though of course they have not 

 delayed the return of full daylight, which has the most cheering 

 effect. On the 12th commenced one of the thickest and 

 longest blizzards we have yet had. Except for a calm interval 

 of six hours on the 13th, the snow was whirling about us con- 

 tinually till midday on the 16th. The wind as usual commenced 

 in the south and gradually worked round to the east, and the 

 temperature rose at one time to + 2 . This blizzard seems to 

 have cleared the air for the time, as the weather since has been 

 bright and clear, and we have had the most gorgeous light 

 effects. 



' On Saturday night between ten and eleven we witnessed 

 an especially curious sight. The sun was behind Mount 

 Discovery, and cast a clear shadow of its cone on a bank of 

 cirro-stratus cloud on the near side. This effect was very 

 curious ; there appeared to be a clearly denned inverted cone 

 superimposed on the top of the mountain.' 



1 October 20. — I think it may safely be said that our scurvy 

 is at an end, and unless it is produced again in the sledge 

 parties we shall hear no more of it. I do not think the milder 

 conditions of the future sledging season are likely to reproduce 

 it, but so as to avoid the risk I have been arranging to replace 

 the pemmican by a proportion of cooked seal-meat. The 

 difficulty here is to get it free from water, and the only way is 

 to cook it again and again, but with all our efforts I doubt 

 whether we shall get quite the same value for weight as we do 

 in the pemmican.' 



It may be of interest here to quote the result of some of 

 our experiments in this line, though, of course, they rest on 

 estimation, as we had no facilities for chemical analysis. 



We took 140 lbs. of seal- meat, and cooked it in 20 lbs. of 

 margarine, producing as a result 60 lbs. of cooked meat ; or, 

 in other words, we evaporated off a little under two-thirds of 



