INTRODUCTION 
Potar exploration is at once the cleanest and most iso- 
lated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It 
is the only form of adventure in which you put on your 
clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas, 
and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, 
find them as clean as though they were new. It is more 
lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, 
and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare 
the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so it 
would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the 
Antarctic as a medium of discomfort. A member of Camp- 
bell’s party tells me that the trenches at Ypres were a com- 
parative picnic. But until somebody can evolve a standard 
of endurance I am unable to see how it can be done. Take 
it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse 
time than an Emperor penguin. 
Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the 
Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipi- 
tous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which 
encircled man’s habitation, and nothing is more striking 
about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions than 
its absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the 
Vikings were navigating the ice-fields of the North; yet 
when Wellington fought the battle of Waterloo there was 
still an undiscovered continent in the South. 
For those who wish to read an account of the history 
of Antarctic exploration there is an excellent chapter in 
Scott’s Voyage of the Discovery and elsewhere. I do not 
propose to give any general survey of this kind here, but 
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