nerves that they did not speak for days for
fear of quarrelling; how angry we felt when the cook ran short on the
weekly bag; how sick we were after the first meals when we could eat as
much as we liked; how anxious we were when a man fell ill many hundreds
of miles from home, and we had a fortnight of thick weather and had to
find our depots or starve. We remember the cry of _Camp Ho!_ which
preceded the cup of tea which gave us five more miles that evening; the
good fellowship which completed our supper after safely crossing a bad
patch of crevasses; the square inch of plum pudding which celebrated our
Christmas Day; the chanties we sang all over the Barrier as we marched
our ponies along.

We travelled for Science. Those three small embryos from Cape Crozier,
that weight of fossils from Buckley Island, and that mass of material,
less spectacular, but gathered just as carefully hour by hour in wind and
drift, darkness and cold, were striven for in order that the world may
have a little more knowledge, that it may build on what it knows instead
of on what it thinks.

Some of our men were ambitious: some wanted money, others a name; some a
help up the scientific ladder, others an F.R.S. Why not? But we had men
who did not care a rap for money or fame. I do not believe it mattered to
Wilson when he found that Amundsen had reached the Pole a few days before
him--not much. Pennell would have been very bored if you had given him a
knighthood. Lillie, Bowers, Priestley, Debenham, Atkinson and many others
were much the same.

But there is no love lost between the class of men who go out and do such
work and the authorities at home who deal with their collections. I
remember a conversation in the hut during the last bad winter. Men were
arguing fiercely that professionally they lost a lot by being down South,
that they fell behindhand in current work, got out of the running and so
forth. There is a lot in that. And then the talk went on to the
publication of results, and the way in which they would wish them done. A
said he wasn't going to hand over his work to be mucked up by such and
such a body at home; B said he wasn't going to have his buried in museum
book-shelves never to be seen again; C said he would jolly well publish
his own results in the scientific journals. And the ears of the armchair
scientists who might deal with our hard-won specimens and observations
should have been warm that night.

At the time I felt