arried to the Antarctic on the
open bridge of the Aurora. With a sheath-knife, the sledging cook cut
off three small chunks of two ounces each from the frozen butter every
day at lunch. To show how the appetite is affected by extreme cold,
one feels that butter is a wholesome thing just in itself, being more
inclined to eat a pound than two ounces.

Sugar--the carbohydrate, sucrose--has special qualities as a food since
it is quickly assimilated, imparting within a few minutes fresh energy
for muscular exertion. Athletes will support this; in fact, a strong
solution of sugar in water is used as a stimulant in long-distance
running and other feats of endurance. Wild, for instance, found as
a matter of experience that chocolate was preferable to cheese as a
sledging food, even though similar weights had approximately the same
food-value.

Cocoa and tea were the two sledging beverages. The cocoa was used for
two meals, the first and the last in the day, and the tea for lunch.
Both contain stimulating alkaloids, theobromine and caffeine, and fat is
a notable constituent of cocoa. Of course, their chief nourishing value,
as far as we were concerned, lay in the glaxo and sugar added.

Lastly, plasmon chocolate is a preparation of pure chocolate (a mixture
of ground cocoa, white sugar and starch) with the addition of 10 per
cent. of plasmon.

As food for the dogs, there was nothing better than dried seal-steaks
with the addition of a little blubber. Ordinary pemmican is readily
eaten, but not appreciated by the dogs in the same way as seal meat.
To save weight, the meat was dried over the stove without heating it
sufficiently to cook it. By this measure, almost 50 per cent. in weight
was saved.

The Hut was all agog with movement and bustle on the days when rations
were being made up and packed. Starting from the earliest stage in
the process, there would be two men in the outer Hut grinding plasmon
biscuit into powder. One would turn away for dear life and the other
smash the biscuit with a hammer on a metal slab and feed continuously
into the grinder. The atmosphere would be full of the nauseous vapours
of blubber arising from dishes on the stove where seal meat was drying
for the dogs. Ninnis and Mertz superintended in this department, in
careless moments allowing the blubber to frizzle and diffuse its aroma
through the Hut.

Inside, spread along the eighteen-foot table would be the weighers, the
bag-makers or machi