INTRODUCTION lvil 
popular. For reading they had David Copperfield, the 
Decameron, the Life of Stevenson and a New Testament. 
And they did Swedish drill, and they gave lectures. 
Their worst difficulties were scurvy? and ptomaine 
poisoning, for which the enforced diet was responsible. 
From the first they decided to keep nearly all their unused 
rations for sledging down the coast in the following spring, 
and this meant that they must live till then on the seal and 
penguin which they could kill. The first dysentery was 
early in the winter, and was caused by using the salt from 
the sea-water. They had some Cerebos salt, however, in 
their sledging rations, and used it for a week, which stopped 
the disorder and they gradually got used to the sea-ice salt. 
Browning, however, who had had enteric fever in the past, 
had dysentery almost continually right through the winter. 
Had he not been the plucky, cheerful man he is, he would 
have died. 
In June again there was another bad attack of dysen- 
tery. Another thing which worried them somewhat was 
the ‘igloo back,’ a semi-permanent kink caused by seldom 
being able to stand upright. 
Then, in the beginning of September, they had pto- 
maine poisoning from meat which had been too long in 
what they called the oven, which was a biscuit box, hung 
over the blubber stove, into which they placed the frozen 
meat to thaw it out. This oven was found to be not quite 
level, and in a corner a pool of old blood, water and scraps 
of meat had collected. This and a tainted hoosh which 
they did not have the strength of mind to throw away in 
their hungry condition, seems to have caused the outbreak, 
which was severe. Browning and Dickason were especially 
bad. 
They had their bad days: those first days of realization 
that they would not be relieved: days of depression, disease 
and hunger, all at once: when the seal seemed as if they 
would give out and they were thinking they would have 
to travel down the coast in the winter—but Abbott killed 
1 Atkinson has no doubt that the symptoms of the Northern Party were those of 
early scurvy. Conditions of temperature in the igloo allowed of decomposition occurring 
in seal meat. Fresh seal meat brought in from outside reduced the scurvy symptoms. 
