But although brash ice was too plentiful biscuits were too scarce, and we were already reduced to one Plasmon biscuit each for breakfast and one for evening meals, and we had become exceedingly careful over the crumbs. At first, on this expedition, when biscuits were more plentiful we had munched them boldly, regardless of the loss of crumbs. Not so at this time, when crumbs were collected most carefully by the man to whom they belonged.
Uneventful days of sledging followed—days on which we were tired at night and hungry nearly always; but on the 9th we were cheered by a fine, though distant, view of the Nordenskjold Ice Barrier to the north of us, and we were all extremely anxious to find out what sort of surface for sledging this great glacier was going to offer us.
According to the Admiralty chart, prepared from observations by the Discovery expedition, this glacier was twenty-four to thirty miles wide, and projected over twenty miles from the rocky shore into the sea. We hoped that we should be able to cross it without following a circuitous route along its seaward margins.
Two days later we reached the Nordenskjold Ice Barrier, and as Mawson wished to take some observations, Mackay and I decided to explore the glacier for the purpose of selecting a suitable track (if we could find it) for our sledges.
On our return we were able to tell Mawson the good news that the barrier was quite practicable for sledging; while he informed us that, as the result of his observations, the Magnetic Pole was probably about forty miles further inland than the theoretical mean position calculated for it from the magnetic observations of the Discovery expedition seven years before.
Early on the morning of the 12th we packed up and started to cross the barrier, and on the second day we had not sledged for more than a thousand yards when Mawson suddenly exclaimed that he could see the end of the barrier, where it ended in a white cliff some 600 yards ahead.
We halted the sledge, and while Mawson took some theodolite angles Mackay and I tried to find a way down the cliff, but failed to find it. Once more we reconnoitred, and this time Mawson and I found some steep slopes formed by drift snow, which were just practicable for a light sledge lowered by an alpine rope.
We chose what seemed to be the best of these slopes and Mackay, having tied the rope round his body and having taken his ice-axe, went down the slope cautiously, Mawson and I holding on to the rope meanwhile.
The snow gave a good foothold, and he was soon at the bottom without needing support from the rope. Then, when he had returned to the top, we all set to work unpacking the sledges, and after loading one sledge lightly we lowered it little by little down the slope, one of us guiding the sledge while the other two slackened out the alpine rope above. The man who went to the bottom unloaded the sledge on the sea-ice, and then climbed back again, while the others hauled up the empty sledge. This manœuvre was repeated again and again until everything was safe, and we very glad to have crossed the ice barrier so quickly. There can be little doubt, I think, that this Nordenskjold Ice Barrier is afloat.
On the following day we were naturally anxious to be sure of our exact position on the chart, in view of the fact that we had come to the end of the barrier some eighteen miles quicker than the chart had led us to anticipate. Accordingly, Mawson worked up his meridian altitude, while I plotted out the angular distances he had found respectively for Mount Erebus, Mount Lister and Mount Melbourne.