494 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 



landed. They thought that the ship had been wrecked — or 

 that every one had been taken off from here, and that then 

 the ship had been blown north by a succession of furious 

 gales which they had and could not get back. They never 

 considered seriously the possibility of sledging down the 

 coast before the winter. They got settled in and were very 

 warm — so warm that in August they did away with one 

 door, of which they had three, of biscuit boxes and sacking. 



Their stove was the bottom of an oil tin, and they 

 cooked by dripping blubber on to seal bones, which became 

 soaked with the blubber, and Campbell tells me they 

 cooked almost as quickly as a primus. Of course they were 

 filthy. Their main difficulty was dysentery and ptomaine 

 poisoning. 



Their stories of the winter are most amusing — of 

 "Placing the Plug, or Sports in the Antarctic"; of lec- 

 tures ; of how dirty they were ; of their books, of which 

 they had four, including David Copperfield. They had a 

 spare tent, which was lucky, for the bamboos of one of theirs 

 were blown in during a big wind, and the men inside it 

 crept along the piedmont on hands and knees to the igloo 

 and slept two in a bag. How the seal seemed as if they 

 would give out, and they were on half rations and very 

 hungry : and they were thinking they would have to come 

 down in the winter, when they got two seals : of the fish 

 they got from the stomach of a seal — " the best feed they 

 had " — the blubber they have eaten. 



But they were buried deep in the snow and quite warm. 

 Big winds all the time from the W.S.W., cold winds off 

 the plateau — in the igloo they could hear almost nothing 

 outside — how they just had a biscuit a day at times, sugar 

 on Sundays, etc. 



And so all is well in this direction, and we have done 

 right in going south, and we have at least succeeded in get- 

 ting all records. I suppose any news is better than no news. 



Evening. The Pole Party photos of themselves at the 

 Pole and at the Norwegian cairn (a Norwegian tent, post 

 and two flags) are very good indeed — one film is unused, 

 one used on these two subjects : taken with Birdie's 



