Monday, 30 January 1911

Scott

Wilson was much more impressed with the dogs than Scott had been a few days earlier. "Dog-driving like this," Wilson wrote later, "is a very different thing to the beastly dog-driving we perpetrated in the Discovery days. I got to love all my team and they all got to know me well, and my old leader even now (I am writing this six months after I have had anything to do with any of them) never fails to come and speak to me, and he knows me and my voice ever so far off." [1]

The first depot, about eighteen miles onto the Barrier at 77.55°, was named Safety Camp for its distance from the edge of the ice and the possibility of calving.

Here, Scott "held a council of war ... I unfolded my plan, which is to go forward with five weeks' food for men and animals: to depôt a fortnight's supply after twelve or thirteen days and return here." [2]

Taylor's First Western Geological Party established their base near the Ferrar Glacier (where they found a depot from the Nimrod Expedition) and began their survey of the nearby glaciers and the McMurdo Dry Valleys.


Notes:

[1] E.A. Wilson, [date not given], quoted by David Crane in Scott of the Antarctic (New York : Knopf, c2005), p.415.
[2] R.F. Scott, diary, 30 January, 1911, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition, v.1.