ave tried several boxes--metal), to realize
this as an advantage.

The immediate and increasingly pressing disadvantage is that you have no
sugar. Have you ever had a craving for sugar which never leaves you, even
when asleep? It is unpleasant. As a matter of fact the craving for sweet
things never seriously worried us on this journey, and there must have
been some sugar in our biscuits which gave a pleasant sweetness to our
mid-day tea or nightly hot water when broken up and soaked in it. These
biscuits were specially made for us by Huntley and Palmer: their
composition was worked out by Wilson and that firm's chemist, and is a
secret. But they are probably the most satisfying biscuit ever made, and
I doubt whether they can be improved upon. There were two kinds, called
Emergency and Antarctic, but there was I think little difference between
them except in the baking. A well-baked biscuit was good to eat when
sledging if your supply of food was good: but if you were very hungry an
underbaked one was much preferred. By taking individually different
quantities of biscuit, pemmican and butter we were able roughly to test
the proportions of proteids, fats and carbo-hydrates wanted by the human
body under such extreme circumstances. Bill was all for fat, starting
with 8 oz. butter, 12 oz. pemmican and only 12 oz. biscuit a day. Bowers
told me he was going for proteids, 16 oz. pemmican and 16 oz. biscuit,
and suggested I should go the whole hog on carbo-hydrates. I did not like
this, since I knew I should want more fat, but the rations were to be
altered as necessary during the journey, so there was no harm in trying.
So I started with 20 oz. of biscuit and 12 oz. of pemmican a day.

Bowers was all right (this was usual with him), but he did not eat all
his extra pemmican. Bill could not eat all his extra butter, but was
satisfied. I got hungry, certainly got more frost-bitten than the
others, and wanted more fat. I also got heartburn. However, before taking
more fat I increased my biscuits to 24 oz., but this did not satisfy me;
I wanted fat. Bill and I now took the same diet, he giving me 4 oz. of
butter which he could not eat, and I giving him 4 oz. of biscuit which
did not satisfy my wants. We both therefore had 12 oz. pemmican, 16 oz
biscuit and 4 oz. butter a day, but we did not always finish our butter.
This is an extremely good ration, and we had enough to eat during most of
this journey. We certainly could not have