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On the 31st we were out of our bags and about, soon after six, to find it still drifting but showing signs of clearing. After breakfast we dug out sledges, and Lashly and Day got the snow out of the motor, a long and rotten job. The weather cleared about 11 a.m. and we got under way at noon. It turned out very fine and we advanced our weights 7 miles 600 yards, camping at 10.40.
If the precious provisions had gone down with the horse into the bowels of the ice, Shackleton would have been obliged to turn back. Now left without assistance in dragging the sledges, they had to struggle up the glacier between rocks and slates in which coal was imbedded. On Christmas Day the temperature was down to-47° a fine midsummer!
A quarter of an hour later the sledges were at the door, and the party started. The hunt was even less successful than that of the previous day. No stag was seen, but some ten hares and five brace of grouse were shot.
On his way he fell in with Eskimos, who told him that several years before a party of about forty white men had been seen hauling a boat and sledges over the ice. This was on the west side of the island called King William's Land.
After the sledges came the turn of the ponies there was a good deal of difficulty in getting some of them into the horse box, but Oates rose to the occasion and got most in by persuasion, whilst others were simply lifted in by the sailors. Though all are thin and some few looked pulled down I was agreeably surprised at the evident vitality which they still possessed some were even skittish.
Our fixed wire-rope lashings had to be laced together with lengths of thin rope, and this took time; but when properly done, as it was now, the cases were held as though in a vice, and could not move. The zinc plates we had had under the sledges to keep them up in loose snow had been taken off; we could not see that we should have any use for them.
We arrived at "Framheim," our winter quarters, in January, 1912, with two sledges and eleven dogs, all well. On the homeward journey we covered an average of 22 1/2 miles a day. The lowest temperature we observed on this trip was -24° F., and the highest +23° F. The principal result besides the attainment of the Pole is the determination of the extent and character of the Ross Barrier.
On September 8 a party of eight men set out, with seven sledges and ninety dogs, provisioned for ninety days. The surface was excellent, and the temperature not so bad as it might have been. But on the following day we saw that we had started too early.
Some devils are dragging away the damned by the heels and on sledges, and above sits the Redeemer and some angelic and sainted people, looking complacently down upon the scene!
I had left a note at the Corner Camp depot which told Scott of our trying experiences: how the engines overheated so that we had to stop, how by the time they were reasonably cooled the carburettor would refuse duty and must be warmed up with a blow lamp, what trouble Day and Lashly had had in starting the motors, and in short how we all four would heave with all our might on the spans of the towing sledges to ease the starting strain, and how the engines would give a few sniffs and then stop but we must not omit the great point in their favour: the motors advanced the necessaries for the Southern journey 51 miles over rough, slippery, and crevassed ice and gave the ponies the chance to march light as far as Corner Camp this is all that Oates asked for.
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