March 30.—The morning opened bright and cloudless with a temperature -20° C., and a gentle southerly air which has brushed away the heavy humid air of yesterday. Racovitza and I went to a lead which Koren, the cabin-boy, visited yesterday, and who reported thousands of penguins and hundreds of seals. The distance was about two miles and the travelling on the floes was good, but when it was necessary to cross old breaks over the hummocks, and crushed ice, it became a task of considerable difficulty. When we reached the lead we found that what Koren had said was to some extent true. Upon a large hummocky floe in the lead there was much life. We counted twenty crab-eating seals and seventeen king penguins. This was certainly the largest assemblage of the great penguins and seals which we had seen on the pack. With a rifle Racovitza shot six seals and with my ski stick I killed all the penguins. We realised the fact that it was cruel to do this, but the calls of science and the dire needs of our stomachs made the deed absolutely necessary. The seals were all females and from them we obtained four embryos. The penguins were bagged for food. Later in the day a westerly wind raised the temperature and brought great quantities of drift-snow. During the night the wind increased to a half-gale.
March 31.—The wind has veered to the north and is still coming with the force of a half-gale. There are great drifts of snow lined about the bark and over the pack. The temperature is -2° C. Everything is wet and far more uncomfortable than it is when the thermometer is at -20°. The captain and Amundsen have brought aboard two small live penguins and turned them over to Racovitza for physiological experiments. We find it very difficult to bring in our game. It takes the full force of three men to drag the skin and blubber of one seal, weighing perhaps two hundred and fifty pounds. One man cannot drag more than two royal penguins on a sledge when the snow is either extremely dry or slightly humid, as it has been for the past few weeks, but if the penguins are bunched and dragged on their own feathers without a sledge, a man is able to draw six with ease. The lesson which we have learned from this experience is that sledges, if possible, should be shod with a strip of penguin skin with feathers attached. We are designing such a sledge to-day. It is certainly the first effort of the kind on record and we hope it will prove useful.
April 1.—The storm still continues and the barometer is steadily falling, but the wind is coming in gusts, which is a cheerful indication that its force is nearly spent. The one food upon which the most unlimited hatred has been heaped is the fiskabolla. The cook serves these on Fridays, and the coarse sarcasm brought out before and after dinner is certainly remarkable. In the cabin only two men, Gerlache and Amundsen, eat the soft, tasteless, fiberless, and useless things, and they seem to put them away with a grim relish. Lecointe has touched them but once since crossing the Atlantic from Madeira to Rio. Two weeks ago he made a bet with Racovitza, which was supported by a resolution to eat four fiskabolla. Lecointe lost and selected April first on which to pay his forfeit. Poor fellow! I believe he would rather have paid a hundred dollars. He ate the things, but he suffered with gastric discomfort for a week, and resolved forever afterwards never to touch, taste, or smell “embalmed fishballs.”
April 2.—The storm has ceased, and a lighter wind is coming from the south-west. The sky is fairly clear at the zenith, but a bank of atmosphere, charged with fine ice crystals, hangs over the pack and makes the horizon obscure. The sun and the moon, rising and descending through this haze of ice, are distorted, refracted, and deflected, into all sorts of curious fantastic shapes. To-night there was a parhelion in prismatic colours. There was a simple reproduction of the image of the sun, one to each side, and the three suns sank slowly under the hazy violet of the horizon. Soon after, the moon rose through the same haze of floating ice crystals, with luminous spots indicating crescentic rings and four distant moon dogs.
April 3.—The same haze of suspended ice crystals is being driven over the pack, filling up the chasms and rounding all the sharp edges of the hummocks. The temperature is -22° C. and the wind is due south, sending the ice-laden clouds over the crusted snow with a metallic ring. As the sun rose through this mist this morning we saw a variety of parhelia, with bright crescentic patches, changing rapidly in brilliancy and form as the sun ascended. At four in the afternoon the moon rose again through this icy mist. In colour and form it was the most remarkable lunar aspect I ever saw. First, as it came over the horizon, its size seemed so much above what we were accustomed to that we did not easily guess it was the moon. After it rose clear of the ice-line it took a wrinkled, distorted form, which in shape and colour resembled an old withered orange.
April 4.—There has been a great excitement to-day—one which has forced a new interest into the usual sameness of the daily dry routine. The woodwork about the pipe of the cabin stove became ignited, and for a few seconds there was a cry of “fire” and a great scramble for water. Amundsen, with admirable presence of mind, drew out the pipe from the deck and then smothered the flames with snow, while the rest of us hustled about for water, which is always scarce on the Belgica. The captain was able to get an observation of the sun to-day at noon, from which he fixes our position at latitude 71° 22′ 15″, longitude 84° 54′ 45″. A sounding was made which proved the depth of the sea 530 metres. Although the sky has been fairly clear, at noon a steady easterly wind was driving over the pack, sending sharp-edged crystals across the ship with a cutting force. The temperature ranges from -17° to -20° C. In the past forty-eight hours we have drifted northward nine miles, and eastward about eight miles. The wind, coming as it does now with a steady blow, will probably send us drifting westward with a rapid pace.
April 5.—The day opened doubtfully, the sky presenting neither a stormy nor a fair aspect. There is no wind, which is a curious condition of things for this region of eternal blasts. The wind of the past few days has rolled up great drifts, which give a charm of form in rounded irregularities to the surface of the icy sea. With the sudden cessation of the wind, there has been considerable pressure which has fractured some floes and raised great lines of hummocks along the fissures and old leads. The temperature is steadily falling; to-day it ranges from -18° to -27° C. We saw little of the sun except a crimson burst at its setting, but the moon has had for us a curious attraction. It is full, and rose over the north at half-past three this afternoon. The purple twilight curve at this time was feeble but distinctly visible. The moon rose slowly behind this, and had the appearance of a great, irregular ball of crude gold, but as it rose above the purple and over the usual line of orange-red, which limits the curve, it was a full sharply-cut globe, pale yellow and fresh, as though washed in the polar whiteness. This was at five o’clock. The sun had just sunk under a line of snow flushed by a rich rose colour, and the sky above it, in the west, was fired by a mass of feathery clouds. As the moon ascended, all of this display of vivid colours faded into the blue electric glow, which is seen only over the polar pack. By this light we were able to read ordinary print at eleven o’clock at night. The heavens at this time were so bright that only the stars to the fourth magnitude were visible.
April 6.—Still it blows from the east. There is now and then an intermission for a day, or a part of a day, when the wind turns to the north or the south, but strong easterly winds prevail. The other winds are hardly of sufficient force or duration to set the pack into motion. Parhelias and paraselenas are now of daily occurrence. This morning at nine o’clock, when the sun was over a bank of drift-snow on the horizon, there was first, a halo, then a rapidly-changing series of sun dogs; generally two extra suns, one to each side, and all having perpendicular lines drawn through the centres. The days are fading rapidly, and the nights are lengthening with an alarming quickness. The life, too, is less and less in evidence. We now walk miles over the desolate waste of white expanse without seeing penguins or seals, where only a few days ago we saw great numbers. There are some tracks of animals which have been stranded by the closing of fissures and open spaces of water. The direction of these is generally northward, or towards some large iceberg, where there is usually open water into which the creatures dive to seek a more congenial region northward, where the fissures are sure to be open. We took a ski excursion at noon to-day, and travelled over twelve miles without seeing a speck of life.
April 8.—All the leads and open spaces of water seem to have closed, and all the snowy world about us is saddened under the increasing gray of the coming night. Lecointe has put up a box-shaped house in which he intends to make the nautical observations for the year. We of the cabin have all given him a lift at his house-building. The commandant had a hammer and nails; Racovitza had a saw; Arctowski made the plans; Danco acted as general director; Lecointe and I did the horse work of transporting the planks and other material from the ship to the site of the new observatory. We enjoy such little tasks as pastime before and after our regular scientific observations and official duties. It took us one day to build the captain’s house, but it was inartistic in shape, unstable in its setting, and the wind blew through it, making drafts and an interior atmosphere colder than that of the open expanse outside. We next covered it with tar paper and anchored it by banking and burying the structure under snow. The captain made his first observation in the new house to-night. He sighted two stars, came in, and rather hastily said, “It is splendid,” but shortly after I was called upon to attend to two frozen fingers. This is the first result of our newly constructed shelter.
