. The gods loved him, if indeed it be
benevolent to show your favourites a clear, straight, shining path of
life, with plenty of discomfort and not a little pain, but with few
doubts and no fears. Browning might well have had Bowers in mind when he
wrote of

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward;
Never doubted clouds would break;
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph;
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

There was nothing subtle about him. He was transparently simple,
straightforward and unselfish. His capacity for work was prodigious, and
when his own work happened to take less than his full time he
characteristically found activity in serving a scientist or exercising an
animal. So he used to help to send up balloons with self-recording
instruments attached to them, and track the threads which led to them
when detached. He was responsible for putting up the three outlying
meteorological screens and read them more often than anybody else. At
times he looked after some of the dogs because at the moment there was
nobody else whose proper job it happened to be, and he took a particular
fancy to one of our strongest huskies called Krisravitza, which is the
Russian (so I'm told) for 'most beautiful.' This fancy originated in the
fact that to Kris, as the most truculent of our untamed devils, fell a
large share of well-deserved punishment. A living thing in trouble be it
dog or man was something to be helped. Being the smallest man in the
party he schemed to have allotted to him the largest pony available both
for the Depot and Polar Journeys. Their exercise, when he succeeded, was
a matter for experiment, for his knowledge of horses was as limited as
his love of animals was intense. He started to exercise his second pony
(for the first was lost on the floe) by riding him. "I'll soon get used
to him," he said one day when Victor had just deposited him in the
tide-crack, "to say nothing of his getting used to me," he added in a
more subdued voice.

This was open-air work, and as such more congenial than that which had to
be done inside the hut. But his most important work was indoors, and he
brought to it just the same restless enthusiasm which allowed no leisure
for reading or relaxation.

He joined as one of the ship's officers in London. Given charge of the
stores, the way in which he stowed the ship aroused t