THE DEPOT JOURNEY 149 
Bill’s head. I said: ‘I can’t leave him to be eaten alive 
by those whales.’ There was a pick lying up on the floe. 
Titus said: ‘I shall be sick if I have to kill another horse 
like I did the last.’ I had no intention that anybody should 
kill my own horse but myself, and getting the pick I struck 
where Titus told me. I made sure of my job before we 
ran up and jumped the opening in the Barrier, carrying a 
blood-stained pick-axe instead of leading the pony I had 
almost considered safe. 
“We returned to our old camp that night (March 2) 
with Nobby, the only one saved of the five that left One 
Ton Depét. I was fearfully cut up about my pony and 
Punch, but it was better than last night; we knew they 
would not have to starve and that all their troubles were 
now at an end. Before supper I went for a walk along the 
Barrier with Scott, and the next day we started back. We 
left one tent, two sledges and a lot of gear as Nobby could 
only pull two light sledges, and we could not pull anexcessive 
weight on that bad surface. As it was we had over 800 lbs. 
on the sledge when we left. It was a glaring day with the 
surface soft and sandy, a combination of unpleasant cir- 
cumstances. It took five hours to drag as far as the place 
we had originally gone down on to the sea-ice from the 
Barrier. 
“Evans and his party should now have arrived from 
Corner Camp, and as Captain Scott wanted to see if they 
had left a note at Safety Camp, I walked up there while the 
tea was being brewed. It was about 14 miles away, and I 
found traces of the party in the snow, but no note. It fed 
me up to see the walls so recently occupied by our ponies, 
and | was glad to leave. The afternoon march was inter- 
minable; it seemed as if we would never reach the coast. 
At last we came to the Pram Point Pressure Ridges where 
the Barrier joins the peninsula to eastward of Cape Armi- 
tage. They are waves of ice up to 20 feet in height running 
along parallel to each other with a valley in between each, 
and are only crevassed badly at the outer end as far as we 
have seen, though there are smaller crevasses right along. 
We camped in one of these valleys about 9.30 p.m.; I was 
