OCEAN CAMP 
ship. The greatest treasure in the library was a portion of the 
" Encyclopgedia Britannica." This was being continually used 
to settle the inevitable arguments that Avould arise. The sailors 
were discovered one day engaged in a very heated discussion 
on the subject of Money and Exchange, They finally came to 
the conclusion that the Encyclopaedia, since it did not coincide 
with their views, nmst be wrong. 
" For descriptions of every American town that ever has 
been, is, or ever will be, and for full and complete biographies 
of every American statesman since the time of George Washing- 
ton and long before, the Encyclopaedia would be hard to beat. 
Owing to our shortage of matches we have been driven to use 
it for purposes other than the purely literary ones though ; 
and one genius having discovered that the paper used for its 
pages had been impregnated with saltpetre, we can now 
thoroughly recommend it as a very efficient pipe-lighter." 
We also possessed a few books on Antarctic exploration, a 
copy of Browning and one of " The Ancient Mariner." On 
reading the latter, we sympathized with him and wondered 
what he had done with the albatross ; it would have made a 
very welcome addition to om larder. 
The two subjects of most interest to us were our rate of 
drift and the weather. Worsley took observations of the sun 
whenever possible, and his results showed conclusively that the 
drift of our floe was almost entirely dependent upon the winds 
and not much affected by currents. Our hope, of course, was 
to drift northwards to the edge of the pack and then, when 
the ice was loose enough, to take to the boats and row to the 
nearest land. We started off in fine style, drifting north about 
twenty miles in two or three days in a howling south-westerly 
blizzard. Gradually, however, we slowed up, as successive 
observations showed, until we began to drift back to the south. 
An increasing north-easterly wind, which commenced on 
November 7 and lasted for twelve days, damped our spirits for 
a time, until we found that we had only drifted back to the 
south three miles, so that we were now seventeen miles to the 
good. This tended to reassure us in our theories that the ice of 
the Weddell Sea was drifting round in a clockwise direction, 
93 
