PATIENCE CAMP 
with our precious stock of bannocks. He ate four and half of 
a fifth before he could be stopped. The remaining half, with 
the marks of the dog's teeth on it^ I gave to Worsley, who 
divided it up amongst his seven tent-mates ; they each received 
about half a square inch. 
Lees, who was in charge of the food and responsible for its 
safe keeping, wrote in his diary : " The shorter the provisions 
the more there is to do in the commissariat department, con- 
triving to eke out our slender stores as the weeks pass by. No 
housewife ever had more to do than we have in making a little 
go a long way. 
Writing about the bannock that Peter bit makes one wish 
now that one could have many a meal that one has given to 
the dog at home. When one is hungry, fastidiousness goes to 
the winds and one is only too glad to eat up any scraps, regard- 
less of then: antecedents. One is almost ashamed to write of 
all the titbits one has picked up here, but it is enough to say 
that when the cook upset some pemmican on to an old sooty 
cloth and tlirew it outside his galley, one man subsequently 
made a point of acquiring it and scraping off the palatable but 
dirty compound." Another man searched for over an hour in 
the snow where he had dropped a piece of cheese some days 
before, in the hopes of finding a few crumbs. He was rewarded 
by coming across a piece as big as his thumb-nail, and considered 
it well worth the trouble. 
By this time blubber was a regular article of our diet — 
either raw, boiled, or fried. " It is remarkable how our appetites 
have changed in this respect. Until quite recently almost the 
thought of it was nauseating. Now, however, we positively 
demand it. The thick black oil which is rendered down from 
it, rather like train-oil in appearance and cod-liver oil in taste, 
we drink with avidity." 
We had now about enough farinaceous food for two meals 
all round, and sufficient seal to last for a month. Our forty 
days' reserve sledging rations, packed on the sledges, we wished 
to keep till the last. 
But, as one man philosophically remarked in his diary : 
" It will do us all good to be hungry like this, for we will 
111 
