nencumbered otherwise, to jump from one piece of floating ice to
another until he reached the fast edge of the Barrier in order to
let Capt. Scott know what had happened. This he did, of course not
knowing that we or anyone else had seen him go adrift, and being
unable to leave the ponies and all his loaded sledges himself. Crean
had considerable difficulty and ran a pretty good risk in doing this,
but succeeded all right. There were now Scott, Oates, Crean, Gran,
Meares, and myself here and only three sleeping-bags, so the three
first remained to see if they could help Bowers, Cherry-Garrard, and
the ponies, while Meares, Gran, and I returned to look after our dogs
at Hut Point. Here we had only two sleeping-bags for the three of us,
so we had to take turns, and I remained up till 1 o'clock that night
while Gran had six hours in my bag. It was a bitterly cold job after
a long day. We had been up at 5 with nothing to eat till 1 o'clock,
and walked 14 miles. The nights are now almost dark.

_March_ 2. A very bitter wind blowing and it was a cheerless job
waiting for six hours to get a sleep in the bag. I walked down from our
tent to the hut and watched whales blowing in the semi-darkness out
in the black water of the Strait. When we turned out in the morning
the pony party was still on floating ice but not any further from
the Barrier ice. By a merciful providence the current was taking
them rather along the Barrier edge, where they went adrift, instead
of straight out to sea. We could do nothing more for them, so we set
to our work with the dogs. It was blowing a bitter gale of wind from
the S.E. with some drift and we made a number of journeys backwards
and forwards between the Gap and the hut, carrying our tent and
camp equipment down and preparing a permanent picketing line for the
dogs. As the ice had all gone out of the Strait we were quite cut off
from any return to Cape Evans until the sea should again freeze over,
and this was not likely until the end of April. We rigged up a small
fireplace in the hut and found some wood and made a fire for an hour
or so at each meal, but as there was no coal and not much wood we
felt we must be economical with the fuel, and so also with matches
and everything else, in case Bowers should lose his sledge loads,
which had most of the supplies for the whole party to last twelve
men for two months. The weather had now become too thick for us to
distinguish anything in the distance