The hardships of sledging are made up of innumerable small worries. For the first two or three days we were all plagued with cramp; we could hardly bend up our knees to tie a moccasin or put on a foot wrapper without being obliged to kick out suddenly, overbalancing ourselves and our neighbours into a general mêlée, like a row at Donnybrook Fair. When the men began to get warm in their bags, muffled remarks about the cramp gradually gave place to smothered snores that would last till morning, and then the performers would wake with a firm conviction that they had never slept at all. On our first night of spring sledging the temperature fell to minus 35°, and many lay awake with the cold. Four nights afterwards it was nearly ten degrees colder, but the tents were better banked up and the under robes and coverlet better laced together; some of us, moreover, had discovered that turning the mouth of the bag under and lying on it greatly increased the warmth. The officer is the outside man at the end of the tent away from the door. It is his duty to call the cook the first thing in the morning. It is no easy thing to wake at the right hour when the sun shines impartially all the twenty-four. The watch is often consulted two or three times before five o’clock comes. Then the cook turns out, lights his lamp, has a pipe, sets some snow melting, and scrapes down cocoa for breakfast; afterwards he walks in over his sleeping companions, and brushes down the snowy festoons of frozen breath hanging from the tent.

THE DAY’S MARCH DONE.

Cocoa and pemmican are disposed of soon after seven. The frozen blanket wrappers and moccasins that have served for a pillow have to be got on again, and about eight the sledge is again ready to start. Packing is cold work, and everybody is anxious to be off and get up a little warmth with exercise.

In our next day’s march we visited the snow-house built by Petersen in the autumn, and found its roof level with the snow. A fox had taken up his quarters in it, and made very free with the dog biscuit. That night we camped near a conspicuous mass of ice on the shore of a small island. The spot afterwards became a well-known landmark. Partly by accident, and partly because the striking piles of ice made a definite point to march for, the numerous shorter sledge parties often halted there for lunch or camp. Upon one such occasion the drawing reproduced in this book was obtained ([Plate No. 12]). The floeberg itself was not a very large one, but it afforded an excellent example of the structure of polar floe. We could not but wonder what enormous force had pushed it upwards on the sloping beach till its flat upper surface stood forty feet above the floes around it. The lower half was made of what may be called conglomerate ice, the upper was stratified with the usual white and blue layers—white where the ice was spongy with air-cells, blue in the denser layers between. High overhead might be seen a section, in olive-tinted ice, of what had once been a summer pool, and on top of all, like sugar on a cake, lay last season’s snow, slowly condensing into ice.

Plate XII.—A FLOEBERG, SIMMON’S ISLAND, April, 1876.—p. [59].