“Practical Cherry suggested pitching the tent as a mark of our whereabouts, and having done this I mounted the theodolite to watch Crean through the telescope.  The rise and fall of the floe made this difficult, especially as a number of Emperor penguins came up and looked just like men in the distance.  Fortunately the sunlight cleared the frost smoke, and as it fell calm our westerly motion began to decrease.  The swell started to go down.  Outside us in the centre of the Strait all the ice had gone out, and open water remained.  We were one of a line of loose floes floating near the Barrier edge.  Crean was hours moving to and fro before I had the satisfaction of seeing him up on the Barrier.  I said:  ‘Thank God one of us is out of the wood, anyhow.’

“It was not a pleasant day that Cherry and I spent all alone there, knowing as we did that it only wanted a zephyr from the south to send us irretrievably out to sea; still there is satisfaction in knowing that one has done one’s utmost, and I felt that having been delivered so wonderfully so far, the same Hand would not forsake us at the last.

“We gave the ponies all they could eat that day.  The Killers were too interested in us to be pleasant.  They had a habit of bobbing up and down perpendicularly, so as to see over the edge of a floe, in looking for seals.  The huge black and yellow heads with sickening pig eyes only a few yards from us at times, and always around us, are among the most disconcerting recollections I have of that day.  The immense fins were bad enough, but when they started a perpendicular dodge they were positively beastly.  As the day wore on skua gulls, looking upon us as certain carrion, settled down comfortably near us to await developments.  The swell, however, was getting less and less and it resolved itself into a question of speed, as to whether the wind or Captain Scott would reach us first.

“Crean had got up into the Barrier at great risks to himself as I gathered afterwards from his very modest account.  He had reached Captain Scott some time after his [Scott’s] meeting with Wilson.[124] I heard that at the time Captain Scott was very angry with me for not abandoning everything and getting away safely myself.  For my own part I must say that the abandoning of the ponies was the one thing that had never entered my head.  It was a long way round, but at 7 P.M. he arrived at the edge of the Barrier opposite us with Oates and Crean.  Everything was still, and Cherry and I could have got on safe ice at any time during the last half hour by using the sledge as a ladder.  A big overturned fragment had jambed in the lane, between a high floe and the Barrier edge, and, there being no wind, it remained there.  However, there was the consideration of the ponies, so we waited.