MAKING OUR EASTING DOWN 31 
reads just where the needle is pointing on the compass card 
before him, say S. 47 E., and knows that this is the course 
which is to be steered by the binnacle compass. 
Pennell’s yells were so frequent and ear-piercing that 
he became famous for them, and many times in working 
on the ropes in rough seas and big winds, we have been 
cheered by this unmusical noise over our heads. 
We left Simon’s Bay on Friday, September 2, ‘to make 
our Easting down’ from the Cape of Good Hope to New 
Zealand, that famous passage in the Roaring Forties which 
can give so much discomfort or worse to sailing ships on 
their way. 
South Africa had been hospitable. The Admiral Com- 
manding the Station, the Naval Dockyard, and H.M.S. 
Mutine and H.M.S. Pandora, had been more than kind. 
They had done many repairs and fittings for us and had 
sent fatigue parties to do it, thus releasing men for a cer- 
tain amount of freedom on shore, which was appreciated 
after some nine weeks at sea. I can remember my first long 
bath now. 
Scott, who was up country when we arrived, joined the 
ship here, and Wilson travelled ahead of us to Melbourne 
to carry out some expedition work, chiefly dealing with 
the Australian members who were to join us in New 
Zealand. 
One or two of us went out to Wynberg, which Oates 
knew well, having been invalided there in the South 
African War with a broken leg, the result of a fight against 
big odds when, his whole party wounded, he refused to 
surrender. He told me later how he had thought he would 
bleed to death, and the man who lay next to him was con- 
vinced he had a bullet in the middle of his brain—he could 
feel it wobbling about there! Just now his recollections 
only went so far as to tell of a badly wounded Boer who lay 
in the next bed to him when he was convalescent, and how 
the Boer insisted on getting up to open the door for him 
every time he left the ward, much to his own discomfort. 
Otherwise the recollections which survive of South 
Africa are an excellent speech made on the expedition by 
