ebruary 14, and the ship was kept in the shelter of the
iceberg. During the day enormous pieces were observed to be continually
breaking away from the berg and drifting to leeward.

Captain Davis continues: "At midnight there was a strong swell from the
north-east and the temperature went down to 18 degrees F. At 4 A.M.,
February 15, we reached the northern end of the berg and stood first of
all to the east, and then later to the south-east.

"At 8.45 A.M., shelf-ice was observed from aloft, trending approximately
north and south in a long wall. At noon we came up with the floe-ice
again, in about the same latitude as on the western side of the long
iceberg. Land could be seen to the southward. At 1 P.M. the ship stopped
at the junction of the floe and the shelf-ice."

Wild, Harrison and Hoadley went to examine the shelf-ice with a view
to its suitability for a wintering station. The cliff was eighty to one
hundred feet in height, so that the ice in total thickness must have
attained at least as much as six hundred feet. Assisted by snow-ramps
slanting down on to the floe, the ascent with ice-axes and alpine rope
was fairly easy.

Two hundred yards from the brink, the shelf-ice was thrown into
pressure-undulations and fissured by crevasses, but beyond that was
apparently sound and unbroken. About seventeen miles to the south the
rising slopes of ice-mantled land were visible, fading away to the far
east and west.

The ice-shelf was proved later on to extend for two hundred miles from
east to west, ostensibly fusing with the Termination Ice-Tongue, whose
extremity is one hundred and eighty miles to the north. The whole has
been called the Shackleton Ice-Shelf.

Wild and his party unanimously agreed to seize upon this last
opportunity, and to winter on the floating ice.

The work of discharging stores was at once commenced. To raise the
packages from the floe to the top of the ice-shelf, a "flying-fox" was
rigged.

"A kedge-anchor was buried in the sea-ice, and from this a
two-and-a-half-inch wire-hawser was led upwards over a pair of
sheer-legs on top of the cliff to another anchor buried some distance
back. The whole was set taut by a tackle. The stores were then slung to
a travelling pulley on the wire, and hauled on to the glacier by means
of a rope led through a second pulley on the sheer-legs. The ship's
company broke stores out of the hold and sledged them three hundred
yards to the foot of an aerial, whe