PREFACE 
" The Ships of the Expedition. 
" The two ships for the Expedition have now been selected. 
''The Endurance, the ship which will take the Trans- 
continental party to the Weddell Sea, and will afterwards 
explore along an unknown coast-line, is a new vessel, specially 
constructed for Polar work under the supervision of a com- 
mittee of Polar explorers. She was built by Christensen, the 
famous Norwegian constructor of sealing vessels, at San- 
defjord. She is barquentine rigged, and has triple-expansion 
engines giving her a speed under steam of nine to ten knots. 
To enable her to stay longer at sea, she will carry oil fuel 
as well as coal. She is of about 350 tons, and built of 
selected pine, oak, and greenheart. This fine vessel, equipped, 
has cost the Expedition £14,000. 
The Aurora, the ship which will take out the Ross Sea party, 
has been bought from Dr. Mawson. She is similar in all respects 
to the I'erra Nova, of Captain Scott's last Expedition. She had 
extensive alterations made by the Government authorities in 
Austraha to fit her for Dr. Mawson's Expedition, and is now at 
Hobart, Tasmania, where the Ross Sea party will join her in 
October next." 
I started the preparations in the middle of 1913, but no 
public announcement was made until January 13, 1914. For 
the last six months of 1913 I was engaged in the necessary 
preliminaries, solid mule work, showing nothing particular to 
interest the public, but essential for an Expedition that had to 
have a ship on each side of the Continent, with a land journey 
of eighteen hundred miles to be made, the first nine hundred 
miles to be across an absolutely unknown land mass. 
On January 1, 1914, having received a promised financial 
support sufiicient to warrant the amiouncement of the Ex- 
pedition, I made it public. 
The first result of this was a flood of applications from all 
classes of the community to join the adventure. I received 
nearly five thousand applications, and out of these were picked 
fifty-six men. 
In March, to my great disappointment and anxiety, the 
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