The open season which still remained before the freezing of the sea made progress impossible was spent in surveying the 500 miles of cliff which marks the northern limit of the Great Ice Barrier.  Passing the extreme eastward position reached by Ross in 1842, they sailed on into an unknown world, and discovered a deep bay, called Balloon Bight, where the rounded snow-covered slopes undoubtedly were land and not, as heretofore, floating ice.  Farther east, as they sailed, shallow soundings and gentle snow slopes gave place to steeper and more broken ridges, until at last small black patches in the snow gave undoubted evidence of rock; and an undiscovered land, now known as King Edward VII.’s Land, rose to a height of several thousand feet.  The presence of thick pack ahead, and the advance of the season, led Scott to return to McMurdo Sound, where he anchored the Discovery in a little bay at the end of the tongue of land now known as the Hut Point Peninsula, and built the hut which, though little used in the Discovery days, was to figure so largely in the story of this his last expedition.

The first autumn was spent in various short journeys of discovery—­discovery not only of the surrounding land but of many mistakes in sledging equipment and routine.  It is amazing to one who looks back upon these first efforts of the Discovery Expedition that the results were not more disastrous than was actually the case.  When one reads of dog-teams which refused to start, of pemmican which was considered to be too rich to eat, of two officers discussing the ascent of Erebus and back in one day, and of sledging parties which knew neither how to use their cookers or lamp, nor how to put up their tents, nor even how to put on their clothes, then one begins to wonder that the process of education was gained at so small a price.  “Not a single article of the outfit had been tested; and amid the general ignorance that prevailed the lack of system was painfully apparent in everything."[15]

This led to a tragedy.  A returning sledge party of men was overtaken by a blizzard on the top of the Peninsula near Castle Rock.  They quite properly camped, and should have been perfectly comfortable lying in their sleeping-bags after a hot meal.  But the primus lamps could not be lighted, and as they sat in leather boots and inadequate clothing being continually frost-bitten they decided to leave the tent and make their way to the ship—­sheer madness as we now know.  As they groped their way in the howling snow-drift the majority of the party either slipped or rolled down a steep slippery snow slope some thousand feet high ending in a precipitous ice-cliff, below which lay the open sea.  It is a nasty place on a calm summer day:  in a blizzard it must be ghastly.  Yet only one man, named Vince, shot down the slope and over the precipice into the sea below.  How the others got back heaven knows.  One seaman called Hare, who separated from the others and lay down under a rock, awoke after thirty-six