208 
SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION 
[February 
our joy succeeded, for iJic handy-man was rarely ' done.' 
But he never turned a hair, and booked the bets that now 
filled the air. Again Debenham proceeded to try, and 
failed — and Wright and I were equally unsuccessful. 
Evans made quite a haul, but after saying he had never 
seen anyone do it by sheer luck before, he proceeded to 
teach us the dodge ; and later Debenham became quite 
a knot-master under his willing tuition. 
' A fine sunny morning, the first for many days. 
Even this scene of desolation looks cheerful.' Thus 
my sledge diary for the 21st. But the route did not im- 
prove. I wrote : ' We got going on awful stuff — rounded 
pools of ice, between tables. It got worse and worse, 
and after many bumps and leaps and falls I decided to 
prospect. We had done half a mile in the hour. . . . We 
started again about 3 p.m. Awful heavy work over 
glass-house " and leaping three-foot chasms, between 
high fascines and across decomposing rivers of ice.' 
About 4.30 we saw a ragged piece of skin projecting 
from under an ice-table and found that it was part of a 
large fish. We spent half an hour chipping it out and 
recovered the dorsal spines, skin, tail, and the vertebrae. 
These were preserved in a yellow fatty substance smelling 
like vaseline and quite soft. I made rather a ludicrous 
mistake here. I carefully preserved a very hard irregular 
mass coated with this flesh, thinking it was a bone, but 
later, after we had carried it for days on the sledge, we 
found that this ' pelvic bone ' as we called it' — melted 
in warm water ! No head was found, and in this respect 
the fish — which was possibly about four feet long — agrees 
