INTRODUCTION 



Discovery's winter quarters by ten miles. On March 3, 

 she sailed for the north leaving Lieutenant Mulock, R.N., 

 to take the place of Lieutenant Shackleton, who was a 

 reluctant passenger invalided home. In the second winter 

 the acetylene gas-plant was brought into use, and by this 

 means the living-rooms were lighted brilliantly, and with 

 the fresh food brought by the Morning the sufferers from 

 scurvy recovered, and the health of all remained excellent 

 throughout the winter. Sledge expeditions set out again 

 early in the spring, the most successful being that led by 

 Captain Scott into the western mountains. Starting on 

 October 26, he ascended the Ferrar Glacier to the summit 

 of a great plateau of which the mountains formed the 

 broken edge, and the party travelled without dogs, hauling 

 their own sledges over a flat surface of compacted snow 

 nine thousand feet above sea-level until the longitude of 

 146° 33' East, a distance of 278 miles from the ship. 

 This journey proved the existence of a surface beyond 

 the mountains which, although only to be reached by the 

 toilsome and dangerous climbing of a crevassed glacier, 

 and subject to the intensified cold of high altitudes, was 

 as practicable as the Barrier surface itself for rapid 

 travelling, as rapidity is counted in those regions. Thus 

 Scott was able to demonstrate the facility of both kinds 

 of ice travel, over the Antarctic continent as over the 

 Antarctic Sea. 



On February 19, 1904, the Discovery escaped from 

 the harbour in which she had been frozen for two years. 

 The Morning had again come south to meet her with 

 orders to desert the ship if she could not be freed from 

 the ice ; and a larger ship, the Terra Nova, had been sent 

 by the Admiralty to satisfy the fears of nervous hearts 

 at home. The one thing wanting to round off the ex- 

 pedition was a supply of coal to enable the Discovery to 

 follow the track of Wilkes' vessels from the Balleny 



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