** Such was eventually proved to be the case.
The 'Aurora' followed the western side of the ice-tongue for about twenty miles in a southerly direction, at which point there was a white expanse of floe extending right up to the land. Wild and Kennedy, walking several miles towards the land, estimated that it was about twenty-five miles distant. As the surface over which they travelled was traversed by cracks and liable to drift away to sea, all projects of landing there had to be abandoned; furthermore, it was discovered that the ice-tongue, alongside of which the ship lay, was a huge iceberg. A landing on it had been contemplated, but was now out of question.
The main difficulty which arose at this juncture was the failing coal-supply. It was high time to return to Hobart, and, if a western base was to be formed at all, Wild's party would have to be landed without further delay. After a consultation, Davis and Wild decided that under the circumstances an attempt should be made to gain a footing on the adjacent shelf-ice, if nothing better presented itself.
The night was passed anchored to the floe, on the edge of which were numerous Emperor penguins and Weddell seals. A fresh south-easterly wind blew on February 14, and the ship was kept in the shelter of the iceberg. During the day enormous pieces were observed to be continually breaking away from the berg and drifting to leeward.
Captain Davis continues: "At midnight there was a strong swell from the north-east and the temperature went down to 18 degrees F. At 4 A.M., February 15, we reached the northern end of the berg and stood first of all to the east, and then later to the south-east.
"At 8.45 A.M., shelf-ice was observed from aloft, trending approximately north and south in a long wall. At noon we came up with the floe-ice again, in about the same latitude as on the western side of the long iceberg. Land could be seen to the southward. At 1 P.M. the ship stopped at the junction of the floe and the shelf-ice."
Wild, Harrison and Hoadley went to examine the shelf-ice with a view to its suitability for a wintering station. The cliff was eighty to one hundred feet in height, so that the ice in total thickness must have attained at least as much as six hundred feet. Assisted by snow-ramps slanting down on to the floe, the ascent with ice-axes and alpine rope was fairly easy.
Two hundred yards from the brink, the shelf-ice was thrown into pressure-undulations and fissured by crevasses, but beyond that was apparently sound and unbroken. About seventeen miles to the south the rising slopes of ice-mantled land were visible, fading away to the far east and west.
The ice-shelf was proved later on to extend for two hundred miles from east to west, ostensibly fusing with the Termination Ice-Tongue, whose extremity is one hundred and eighty miles to the north. The whole has been called the Shackleton Ice-Shelf.
Wild and his party unanimously agreed to seize upon this last opportunity, and to winter on the floating ice.