“It had evidently been broken before, and the tide was doing the rest.  We were ordered up and it certainly was all too necessary; still Titus and I hung over the old Uncle Bill’s head.  I said:  ’I can’t leave him to be eaten alive by those whales.’  There was a pick lying up on the floe.  Titus said:  ’I shall be sick if I have to kill another horse like I did the last.’  I had no intention that anybody should kill my own horse but myself, and getting the pick I struck where Titus told me.  I made sure of my job before we ran up and jumped the opening in the Barrier, carrying a blood-stained pick-axe instead of leading the pony I had almost considered safe.

“We returned to our old camp that night (March 2) with Nobby, the only one saved of the five that left One Ton Depot.  I was fearfully cut up about my pony and Punch, but it was better than last night; we knew they would not have to starve and that all their troubles were now at an end.  Before supper I went for a walk along the Barrier with Scott, and the next day we started back.  We left one tent, two sledges and a lot of gear as Nobby could only pull two light sledges, and we could not pull an excessive weight on that bad surface.  As it was we had over 800 lbs. on the sledge when we left.  It was a glaring day with the surface soft and sandy, a combination of unpleasant circumstances.  It took five hours to drag as far as the place we had originally gone down on to the sea-ice from the Barrier.

“Evans and his party should now have arrived from Corner Camp, and as Captain Scott wanted to see if they had left a note at Safety Camp, I walked up there while the tea was being brewed.  It was about 11/4 miles away, and I found traces of the party in the snow, but no note.  It fed me up to see the walls so recently occupied by our ponies, and I was glad to leave.  The afternoon march was interminable; it seemed as if we would never reach the coast.  At last we came to the Pram Point Pressure Ridges where the Barrier joins the peninsula to eastward of Cape Armitage.  They are waves of ice up to 20 feet in height running along parallel to each other with a valley in between each, and are only crevassed badly at the outer end as far as we have seen, though there are smaller crevasses right along.  We camped in one of these valleys about 9.30 P.M.; I was thoroughly tired, so I think was everybody else.  We were about a mile from the ice edge; and the problem was where to get Nobby up the precipitous slopes.  This was solved by the arrival of Evans, Atkinson, Forde and Keohane about midnight.  They had seen us coming in from the heights, and had come down for news.  Teddy Evans had arrived the day before, and, being warned off the Barrier edge by a note left by Captain Scott, had made for the land with his party, and one horse Jimmy Pigg.  He had found a good way up a mile or so farther east, almost under Castle Rock.  He had walked to Hut Point with Atkinson the next day and heard of the loss of Cherry, myself and the animals from Bill Wilson and Meares who had been left there to look after their teams.  I hadn’t seen Atkinson for quite a while when we met this time.