enied us.

We came up to the Barrier five miles east of the Cape soon after
1 P.M. The swell from the E.N.E. continued to the end. The Barrier
was not more than 60 feet in height. From the crow's nest one could
see well over it, and noted that there was a gentle slope for at
least a mile towards the edge. The land of Black (or White?) Island
could be seen distinctly behind, topping the huge lines of pressure
ridges. We plotted the Barrier edge from the point at which we met it
to the Crozier cliffs; to the eye it seems scarcely to have changed
since _Discovery_ days, and Wilson thinks it meets the cliff in the
same place.

The Barrier takes a sharp turn back at 2 or 3 miles from the cliffs,
runs back for half a mile, then west again with a fairly regular
surface until within a few hundred yards of the cliffs; the interval is
occupied with a single high pressure ridge--the evidences of pressure
at the edge being less marked than I had expected.

Ponting was very busy with cinematograph and camera. In the angle
at the corner near the cliffs Rennick got a sounding of 140 fathoms
and Nelson some temperatures and samples. When lowering the water
bottle on one occasion the line suddenly became slack at 100 metres,
then after a moment's pause began to run out again. We are curious
to know the cause, and imagine the bottle struck a seal or whale.

Meanwhile, one of the whale boats was lowered and Wilson, Griffith
Taylor, Priestley, Evans, and I were pulled towards the shore. The
after-guard are so keen that the proper boat's crew was displaced and
the oars manned by Oates, Atkinson, and Cherry-Garrard, the latter
catching several crabs.

The swell made it impossible for us to land. I had hoped to see
whether there was room to pass between the pressure ridge and the
cliff, a route by which Royds once descended to the Emperor rookery;
as we approached the corner we saw that a large piece of sea floe ice
had been jammed between the Barrier and the cliff and had buckled
up till its under surface stood 3 or 4 ft. above the water. On top
of this old floe we saw an old Emperor moulting and a young one
shedding its down. (The down had come off the head and flippers
and commenced to come off the breast in a vertical line similar to
the ordinary moult.) This is an age and stage of development of the
Emperor chick of which we have no knowledge, and it would have been
a triumph to have secured the chick, but, alas! there was no way t