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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



SPECIAL MOTOR WHEELS: THE ORIGINAL FORM ON THE LEFT, AN ANTARCTIC FORM 



ON RIGHT 



Ordinary wheels with rubber tires were found to be the most satisfactory 



practically unbroken, were about four- 

 teen hands high, and were of various 

 colors. They were all splendidly strong 

 and healthy, full of tricks and wicked- 

 ness, and ready for any amount of hard 

 work over the snow-fields. 



The fifteen ponies were taken to the 

 coast and shipped by direct steamer to 

 Australia. They came through the test 

 of tropical temperatures unscathed, and 

 at the end of October, 1907, arrived in 

 Sydney, where they were met by Mr 

 Reid and at once transferred to a New 

 Zealand bound steamer. The Colonial 

 governments kindly consented to sus- 

 pend the quarantine restrictions, which 

 would have entailed exposure to summer 

 heat for many weeks, and thirty-five days 

 after leaving China the ponies were 

 landed on Quail Island, in Port Lyttel- 

 ton, and were free to scamper about and 

 feed in idle luxury. 



I had secured in London twenty tons 

 of maize and ten hundredweight of com- 

 pressed Maujee ration for the feeding of 



the ponies in the Antarctic. The maize 

 was packed in about seven hundred tin- 

 lined air-tight cases, and the ration was in 

 one-pound air-tight tins. This ration con- 

 sists of dried beef, carrots, milk, currants 

 and sugar, and it provides a large amount 

 of nourishment with comparatively little 

 weight. One pound of the ration will 

 absorb four pounds of water, and the 

 ponies were very fond of it. We also 

 secured in Australia ten tons of com- 

 pressed fodder, consisting of oats, bran, 

 and chaff. This fodder was packed in 

 two hundred and fifty small bales. 



I placed little reliance on the dogs, as 

 I have already stated, but I thought it 

 advisable to take some of these animals. 

 I knew that a breeder in Stewart Island, 

 New Zealand, had dogs descended from 

 the Siberian dogs used on the Newnes- 

 Borchgrevinck expedition, and I cabled 

 to him to supply as many as he could up 

 to forty. He was only able to let me 

 have nine, but this team proved quite 

 sufficient for the purposes of the expedi- 



