have this chance of working out the errors and rates of our
chronometer watches, and, although I was up at 5 a.m., I could not resist
having a long yarn, which continued far into the night, with those
never-to-be-forgotten friends of mine, Campbell, Pennell, Rennick, and
Bruce, the worthy and delightful lieutenants of the Expedition. Like
little Bowers, Pennell and Rennick have made the supreme sacrifice, and
only Campbell, Bruce and myself remain alive to-day.

January 24 was a busy day. Captain Scott was fetched from the shore
directly after breakfast, and at 10 a.m. the ship left for Glacier Tongue
to shadow as it were, the string of white Siberian ponies which were
being led round over the fast ice in the bay to the southward of Cape
Evans.

On arriving at the Tongue, Pennell selected a nice, natural wharf to put
his ship alongside, and, this done, I got a picketing line out on the ice
for the horses and then got the sledges on to the glacier. It is as well
here to describe Glacier Tongue briefly, since frequent reference will be
made to that icy promontory in this narrative.

Glacier Tongue lies roughly six miles to the S.S.E. of Cape Evans and is
a remarkable spit of ice jutting out, when last surveyed, for four miles
into McMurdo Sound. Soundings showed that it was afloat for a
considerable part of its length, and as Scott found subsequently, a great
portion of it broke adrift in the autumn or winter of 1911 and was
carried by the winds and currents of the Sound to a position forty miles
W.N.W. of Cape Evans, where it grounded, a huge flat iceberg two miles in
length. Glacier Tongue was an old friend of mine, for it was here in the
1902-4 Relief Expedition that the crew of the little "Morning" dumped
twenty tons of coal for the "Discovery" to pick up on her way northward,
when the time came for her to free herself from the besetting ice which
held her prisoner off Hut Point.

The ponies were marched to their tethering place without further accident
than one falling through into the sea, but he was rescued none the worse.
Oates showed himself to advantage in managing the ponies: he was very
fond of telling us that a horse and a man would go anywhere, and I
believe if we sailor-men had had the bad taste to challenge him he would
have hoisted one of those Chinese ma[1] up to the crow's-nest!
[1: Chinese for horse.]

We all had tea on board and then, after checking the sledge loads and
ascertaining that nothing