FIRST ANTARCTIC NIGHT 399 
twilight at noon failed to remind the watchful that the 
sun was shining far off over the round of the Earth. 
A peculiarity of the storms was the occasional sudden 
rise of temperature with a south wind, the thermometer 
sometimes leaping from — 35 0 to + 20 ° (a rise of 55 
degrees) in a few hours. The party got on no worse 
than the majority of polar wintering parties, and they 
probably felt the melancholy-breeding monotony less than 
many, for they had excellent tinned foods and made a 
point of eating seal and penguin flesh and penguin eggs 
at every opportunity. The general health was good, 
there was no heart trouble and the distressing symptoms 
from which the Belgian expedition suffered were almost 
wholly absent. 
A terrible catastrophe was narrowly escaped towards 
the end of the winter. The hut caught fire from the care- 
less placing of a candle, and the flames were extinguished 
with difficulty. However no great harm was done, and 
the escape was a useful lesson in caution. 
A more serious trouble of the long night was the illness 
which attacked Mr. Hanson, the zoologist. It presented 
some of the symptoms of scurvy, but if it were that dis- 
ease it affected only one of the party, though all fared 
alike. Mr. Hanson grew rapidly worse and died in the 
beginning of spring, on October 14th, 1899, the day when 
the first sign of the new season appeared in the return of 
the penguins from their northern winter quarters to their 
southern nesting places. He was buried in a grave blasted 
in the frozen soil and dug deep into the heart of the under- 
lying ice of a buried glacier. The two Lapps, who were 
much affected, concluded the funeral service by chanting 
a hymn in their own strange language. Spring advanced 
and the summer of the Antarctic came with the never-dip- 
