South | Page 9

and
we were pushing through narrow leads and occasional openings with
the floes often close abeam on either side. Antarctic, snow and stormy
petrels, fulmars, white-rumped terns, and adelies were around us. The
quaint little penguins found the ship a cause of much apparent
excitement and provided a lot of amusement aboard. One of the
standing jokes was that all the adelies on the floe seemed to know
Clark, and when he was at the wheel rushed along as fast as their legs
could carry them, yelling out "Clark! Clark!" and apparently very
indignant and perturbed that he never waited for them or even answered
them.
We found several good leads to the south in the evening, and continued
to work southward throughout the night and the following day. The
pack extended in all directions as far as the eye could reach. The noon
observation showed the run for the twenty-four hours to be 54 miles, a
satisfactory result under the conditions. Wild shot a young Ross seal on
the floe, and we manoeuvred the ship alongside. Hudson jumped down,
bent a line on to the seal, and the pair of them were hauled up. The seal
was 4 ft. 9 in. long and weighed about ninety pounds. He was a young
male and proved very good eating, but when dressed and minus the
blubber made little more than a square meal for our twenty-eight men,
with a few scraps for our breakfast and tea. The stomach contained only
amphipods about an inch long, allied to those found in the whales at
Grytviken.
The conditions became harder on December 14. There was a misty
haze, and occasional falls of snow. A few bergs were in sight. The pack
was denser than it had been on the previous days. Older ice was
intermingled with the young ice, and our progress became slower. The
propeller received several blows in the early morning, but no damage

was done. A platform was rigged under the jib-boom in order that
Hurley might secure some kinematograph pictures of the ship breaking
through the ice. The young ice did not present difficulties to the
'Endurance', which was able to smash a way through, but the lumps of
older ice were more formidable obstacles, and conning the ship was a
task requiring close attention. The most careful navigation could not
prevent an occasional bump against ice too thick to be broken or
pushed aside. The southerly breeze strengthened to a moderate
south-westerly gale during the afternoon, and at 8 p.m. we hove to,
stem against a floe, it being impossible to proceed without serious risk
of damage to rudder or propeller. I was interested to notice that,
although we had been steaming through the pack for three days, the
north-westerly swell still held with us. It added to the difficulties of
navigation in the lanes, since the ice was constantly in movement.
The 'Endurance' remained against the floe for the next twenty-four
hours, when the gale moderated. The pack extended to the horizon in
all directions and was broken by innumerable narrow lanes. Many
bergs were in sight, and they appeared to be travelling through the pack
in a south-westerly direction under the current influence. Probably the
pack itself was moving north-east with the gale. Clark put down a net
in search of specimens, and at two fathoms it was carried south-west by
the current and fouled the propeller. He lost the net, two leads, and a
line. Ten bergs drove to the south through the pack during the
twenty-four hours. The noon position was 61° 31´ S., long. 18° 12´ W.
The gale had moderated at 8 p.m., and we made five miles to the south
before midnight and then we stopped at the end of a long lead, waiting
till the weather cleared. It was during this short run that the captain,
with semaphore hard-a-port, shouted to the scientist at the wheel: "Why
in Paradise don't you port!" The answer came in indignant tones: "I am
blowing my nose."
The 'Endurance' made some progress on the following day. Long leads
of open water ran towards the south-west, and the ship smashed at full
speed through occasional areas of young ice till brought up with a
heavy thud against a section of older floe. Worsley was out on the jib-
boom end for a few minutes while Wild was conning the ship, and he

came back with a glowing account of a novel sensation. The boom was
swinging high and low and from side to side, while the massive bows
of the ship smashed through the ice, splitting it across, piling it mass on
mass and then shouldering it aside. The air temperature was 37° Fahr.,
pleasantly warm, and the water temperature 29° Fahr. We continued to
advance through