ELEPHANT ISLAND 
cided with the times when the island was beset with ice, and 
though on the second occasion we approached close enough to 
fire a gun, in the hope that they would hear the sound and know 
that we were safe and well, yet so accustomed were they to the 
noise made by the calving of the adjacent glacier that either 
they did not hear or the sound passed unnoticed. On August 16 
pack was observed on the horizon, and next day the bay was 
filled with loose ice, which soon consolidated. Soon afterwards 
huge old floes and many bergs drifted in. The pack appears 
as dense as we have ever seen it. No open water is visible, and 
' ice-bUnk ' girdles the horizon. The weather is wretched — 
a stagnant calm of air and ocean alike, the latter obscured by 
dense pack through which no swell can penetrate, and a wet 
mist hangs like a pall over land and sea. The silence is oppres- 
sive. There is nothing to do but to stay in one's sleeping-bag, 
or else wander in the soft snow and become thoroughly wet.'^ 
Fifteen inches of snow fell in the next twenty-four hours, making 
over two feet between August 18 and 21. A sHght swell 
next day from the north-east ground up the pack-ice, but this 
soon subsided, and the pack became consolidated once more. 
On August 27 a strong west-south-west wind sprang up and 
drove all this ice out of the bay, and except for some stranded 
bergs left a clear ice-free sea through which we finally made 
our way from Punta Arenas to Elephant Island. 
As soon as I had left the island to get help for the rest of 
the Expedition, Wild set all hands to collect as many seals and 
penguins as possible, in case their stay was longer than was at 
first anticipated. A sudden rise in temperature caused a whole 
lot to go bad and become unfit for food, so while a fair reserve 
was kept in hand too much was not accumulated. 
At first the meals, consisting mostly of seal meat with one 
hot drink per day, were cooked on a stove in the open. The 
snow and wind, besides making it very unpleasant for the cook, 
filled all the cooking-pots with sand and grit, so during the 
winter the cooking was done inside the hut. 
A little Cerebos salt had been saved, and this was issued 
out at the rate of three-quarters of an ounce per man per week. 
Some of the packets containing the salt had broken, so that all 
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