xxxiv WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
crew were Royal Navy almost without exception, whilst 
the scientific purposes of the expedition were served in 
addition by five scientists. These latter were not naval 
officers. 
The Discovery left New Zealand on Christmas Eve 
1901, and entered the belt of pack ice which always has to 
be penetrated in order to reach the comparatively open sea 
beyond, when just past the Antarctic Circle. But a little 
more than four days saw her through, in which she was 
lucky, as we now know. Scott landed at Cape Adare and 
then coasted down the western coast of Victoria Land just 
as Ross had done sixty years before. As he voyaged south 
he began to look for safe winter quarters for the ship, and 
when he pushed into McMurdo Sound on January 21, 
1902, it seemed that here he might find both a sheltered 
bay into which the ship could be frozen, and a road to the 
southland beyond. 
The open season which still remained before the freez- 
ing of the sea made progress impossible was spent in sur- 
veying the 500 miles of cliff which marks the northern 
limit of the Great Ice Barrier. Passing the extreme east- 
ward position reached by Ross in 1842, they sailed on into 
an unknown world, and discovered a deep bay, called 
Balloon Bight, where the rounded snow-covered slopes 
undoubtedly were land and not, as heretofore, floating ice. 
Farther east, as they sailed, shallow soundings and gentle 
snow slopes gave place to steeper and more broken ridges, 
until at last small black patches 1n the snow gave undoubted 
evidence of rock; and an undiscovered land, now known 
as King Edward VII.’s Land, rose to a height of several 
thousand feet. The presence of thick pack ahead, and the 
advance of the season, led Scott to return to McMurdo 
Sound, where he anchored the Discovery in a little bay at 
the end of the tongue of land now known as the Hut Point 
Peninsula, and built the hut which, though little used in 
the Discovery days, was to figure so largely in the story of 
this his last expedition. 
The first autumn was spent in various short journeys of 
discovery—discovery not only of the surrounding land but 
