270 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
still without feathers in the beginning of January, the 
same egg laid in the summer would leave its produce with- 
out practical covering for the following winter. ‘Thus the 
Emperor penguin is compelled to undertake all kinds of 
hardships because his children insist on developing so 
slowly, very much as we are tied in our human relation- 
ships for the same reason. It is of interest that such a 
primitive bird should have so long a childhood. 
But interesting as the life history of these birds must 
be, we had not travelled for three weeks to see them 
sitting on their eggs. We wanted the embryos, and we 
wanted them as young as possible, and fresh and unfrozen, 
that specialists at home might cut them into microscopic 
sections and learn from them the previous history of birds 
throughout the evolutionary ages. And so Bill and Birdie 
rapidly collected five eggs, which we hoped to carry safely 
in our fur mitts to our igloo upon Mount Terror, where we 
could pickle them in the alcohol we had brought for the 
purpose. We also wanted oil for our blubber stove, and 
they killed and skinned three birds—an Emperor weighs 
up to 64 stones. 
The Ross Sea was frozen over, and there were no seal in 
sight. There were only 100 Emperors as compared with 
2000 in 1902 and 1903. Bill reckoned that every fourth 
or fifth bird had an egg, but this was only a rough esti- 
mate, for we did not want to disturb them unnecessarily. 
It is a mystery why there should have been so few birds, 
but it certainly looked as though the ice had not formed 
very long. Were these the first arrivals? Had a previ- 
ous rookery been blown out to sea and was this the begin- 
ning of a second attempt? Is this bay of sea-ice becoming 
unsafe P 
Those who previously discovered the Emperors with 
their chicks saw the penguins nursing dead and frozen 
chicks if they were unable to obtain a live one. They also 
found decomposed eggs which they must have incubated 
after they had been frozen. Now we found that these birds 
were so anxious to sit on something that some of those 
which had no eggs were sitting on ice! Several times Bill 
