Saturday, 27 January 1912

Scott

A patch of hard sastrugi on the forenoon march slowed their progress, Wilson and Scott pulling on ski and the others on foot. Temperatures were relatively warm at -16 to -14.3° F (-26.7 to -25.7 C) with a dry southerly breeze.

"Our sleeping-bags are slowly but surely getting wetter," wrote Scott, "and I'm afraid it will take a lot of this weather to put them right. However, we all sleep well enough in them, the hours allowed being now on the short side. We are slowly getting more hungry, and it would be an advantage to have a little more food, especially for lunch. If we get to the next depôt in a few marches (it is now less than 60 miles and we have a full week's food) we ought to be able to open out a little, but we can't look for a real feed till we get to the pony food depot. A long way to go, and, by Jove, this is tremendous labour." [1]

"Silas" Wright upon his return to Cape Evans, photographed by Herbert Ponting. [2]

"We reached Hut Point without any further difficulties on January 26, 1912," remembered Wright in his memoirs, "chalking up an average for the return of about 16 statute miles a day. How we looked forward to a bath at Cape Evans! But it was not to be until the following day since Ponting made a claim on our bodies to take part in a cinema record of our arrival up the icefoot at Cape Evans, filthy as we were, unshaven and with our hair uncut and with sledge firmly attached behind us. Art not for art sake, but for publicitys! [sic]" [3]

"Overate," he wrote in his diary a few days later. "Unhappy." [4]

Camped near the glacier that would later be named after Priestley, Campbell wrote in his diary, "After supper I went out with Priestley to collect, and the sun being hot I took off my vest and turning it inside out, put it on over my sweater, where it dried beautifully. I remarked to Priestley at the time that this ought to bring me luck, and sure enough, immediately afterwards I found a sandstone rock containing fossil wood, the best specimen as yet secured by the party." [5]


Amundsen

The Norwegians made time for a farewell dinner at Framheim. Lindstrøm produced champagne -- he had brought it from home, and slept with the bottles in his bed the whole winter to keep them from getting too cold. Amundsen gave another short speech, thanking everyone for work well done.

Because of the ice, the Fram was moored further out than she had been the year before, and it took hard shuttling with the dog teams for the next two days to load. They took only the 39 remaining dogs and the more valuable equipment.


Notes:

[1] R.F. Scott, diary, 27 January, 1912, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition, v.1.
[2] Source unknown.
[3] Quoted by Adrian Raeside in Return to Antarctica: the Amazing Adventure of Sir Charles Wright on Robert Scott's Journey to the South Pole (Mississauga, Ont.: John Wiley, c2009), p.225.
[4] Charles S. Wright, diary, 29 January, 1912, quoted by Adrian Raeside in Return to Antarctica: the Amazing Adventure of Sir Charles Wright on Robert Scott's Journey to the South Pole (Mississauga, Ont.: John Wiley, c2009), p.225.
[5] Victor Campbell, diary, 27 January, 1912, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition, v.2.