pless to correct the error; but I
determined that the very first message from the very first station I set
up on the Antarctic continent should be sent to her to say that I was
safe and everything going splendid.

What happened on Christmas day is a longer story.

On the eighteenth of December, having landed some of my deck cargo and
provisions, and sent up my ship to winter quarters, I was on my way,
with ponies, dogs, and sledges and a large company of men, all in A1
condition, to the lower summit of Mount Erebus, for I intended to set up
my first electric-power-wave station there--that being high enough, we
thought, to permit of a message reaching the plateau of the Polar zone
and low enough (allowing for the curvature of the earth) to cover the
maximum distance in a northerly direction.

It was a long reach, but we chose the rocky ridges and moraines, trying
to avoid the crevassed glaciers, and all went well until the twentieth,
when just as we were reaching the steeper gradients a strong wind sprang
up, blowing straight down the course before us.

All day long we toiled against it, but the weather grew worse, with
gusts of sleet and snow, until the wind reached the force of a hurricane
and the temperature fell to 28 degrees below zero.

There was nothing to do but to wait for the blizzard to blow itself out,
so we plugged down our tents in the shelter of the rocky side of a
ravine that had an immense snow-field behind it.

The first night was bad enough, for the canvas of one tent flew into
ribbons, and the poor chaps in it had to lie uncovered in their
half-frozen sleeping-bags until morning.

All through the twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third the storm
continued, sweeping with terrific force down the ravine, and whirling
the snow in dense masses from the snow-field overhead.

Christmas Eve was worse, with the temperature down to 38 degrees below
zero and the wind up to eighty miles an hour in gusts, and during the
greater part of Christmas Day we were all confined to our sleeping-bags
and half buried in the snow that had drifted in on us.

As a consequence we had no religious service, and if anybody said a De
Profundis it was between his crackling lips under his frozen beard. We
had no Christmas dinner either, except a few Plasmon biscuits and a nip
of brandy and water, which were served out by good old O'Sullivan who
had come with me as doctor to the expedition.

On St. Stephen's Day I made