248 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
memory as that on which I found out that records are not 
worth making. The thermometer as swung by Bowers 
after lunch at 5.51 p.m. registered —'77.5°, which is rog4 
degrees of frost, and is I suppose as cold as any one will 
want to endure in darkness and iced-up gear and clothes. 
The lowest temperature recorded by a Discovery Spring 
Journey party was -67.7°,1 and in those days fourteen 
days was along time fora Spring Party to be away sledging, 
and they were in daylight. This was our tenth day out and 
we hoped to be away for six weeks. 
Luckily we were spared wind. Our naked candle burnt 
steadily as we trudged back in our tracks to fetch our other 
sledge, but if we touched metal for a fraction of a second 
with naked fingers we were frost-bitten. ‘To fasten the 
strap buckles over the loaded sledge was difficult: to 
handle the cooker, or mugs, or spoons, the primus or oil 
can was worse. How Bowers managed with the meteoro- 
logical instruments I do not know, but the meteorological 
log is perfectly kept. Yet as soon as you breathed near the 
paper it was covered with a film of ice through which the 
pencil would not bite. To handle rope was always cold and 
in these very low temperatures dreadfully cold work. The 
toggling up of our harnesses to the sledge we were about 
to pull, the untoggling at the end of the stage, the lashing 
up of our sleeping-bags in the morning, the fastening of 
the cooker to the top of the instrument box, were bad, but 
not nearly so bad as the smaller lashings which were now 
strings of ice. One of the worst was round the weekly food 
bag, and those round the pemmican, tea and butter bags — 
inside were thinner still. But the real devil was the lashing 
of the tent door: it was like wire, and yet had to be tied 
tight. If you had to get out of the tent during the seven © 
hours spent in our sleeping-bags you must tie a string as 
stiff as a poker, and re-thaw your way into a bag already 
as hard as a board. Our paraffin was supplied at a flash 
point suitable to low temperatures and was only a little 
milky: it was very difficult to splinter bits off the butter. — 
1 A thermometer which registered — 77° at the Winter Quarters of H.M.S. Alert — 
on March 4, 1876, is preserved by the Royal Geographical Society. I do not know 
whether it was screened. 
