SOUTH 
and that if we could stay on our piece long enough we must 
eventually be taken up to the north, where lay the open sea 
and the path to comparative safety. 
The ice was not moving fast enough to be noticeable. In 
fact, the only way in which we could prove that we were moving 
at all was by noting the change of relative positions of the 
bergs around us, and, more definitely, by fixing our absolute 
latitude and longitude by observations of the sun. Otherwise , 
as far as actual visible drift was concerned, we might have been 
on dry land. 
Por the next few days we made good progress, drifting seven 
miles to the north on November 24 and another seven miles in 
the next forty-eight hours. We were all very pleased to know 
that although the wind was mainly south-west all this time, 
yet we had made very little easting. The land lay to the west, 
so had we drifted to the east we should have been taken right 
away to the centre of the entrance to the Weddell Sea, and our 
chances of finally reachhig land would have been considerably 
lessened. 
Our average rate of drift was slow, and many and varied 
were the calculations as to when we should reach the pack- 
edge. On December 12, 1915, one man Avrote : Once across 
the Antarctic Circle, it will seem as if we are practically half- 
way home again ; and it is just possible that with favourable 
winds we may cross the chcle before the New Year. A drift 
of only three miles a day would do it, and we have often done 
that and more for periods of three or four weeks. 
" We are now only 250 miles from Paulet Island, but too 
much to the east of it. We are approaching the latitudes in 
which we were at this time last year, on our way down. The 
ship left South Georgia just a year and a week ago, and reached 
this latitude foin: or five miles to the eastward of our present 
position on January 3, 1916, crossing the circle on New Year's 
Eve." 
Thus, after a year's incessant battle with the ice, we had 
returned, by many strange turns of fortune's wheel, to almost 
identically the same latitude that we had left with such high 
hopes and aspirations twelve months previously ; but under what 
94 
