Unfortunately I have no record as to what changes of feeding stuffs Oates would have made if it had been possible.  Certainly we should not have brought the bales of compressed fodder, which as I have already explained,[144] was theoretically green wheat cut young, but practically no manner of use as a food, though of some use perhaps as bulk.  Probably he would have used hay for this purpose at Winter Quarters had our stock of it not been very limited, for hay takes up too much room on a ship when every square inch of stowage space is of value.  The original weights of fodder with which we left New Zealand were:  compressed chaff, 30 tons; hay, 5 tons; oil-cake, 5-6 tons; bran, 4-5 tons; and two kinds of oats, of which the white was better than the black.  We wanted more bran than we had.[145] This does not exhaust our list of feeding stuffs, for one of our ponies called Snippets would eat blubber, and so far as I know it agreed with him.

We left New Zealand with nineteen ponies, seventeen of which were destined for the Main Party and two for the help of Campbell in the exploration of King Edward VII.’s Land.  Two of these died in the big gale at sea, and we landed fifteen ponies at Cape Evans in January.  Of these we lost six on the Depot Journey, while Hackenschmidt, who was a vicious beast, sickened and wasted away in our absence, for no particular reason that we could discover, until there was nothing to do but shoot him.  Thus eight only out of the original seventeen Main Party ponies which started from New Zealand were left by the beginning of the winter.

I have told[146] how, during our absence on the Depot Journey, the ship had tried to land Campbell with his two ponies on King Edward VII.’s Land, but had been prevented from reaching it by pack ice.  Coasting back in search of a landing place they found Amundsen in the Bay of Whales.  Under the circumstances Campbell decided not to land his party there but to try and land on the north coast of South Victoria Land, in which he was finally successful.  In the interval the ship returned to Cape Evans with the news, and since he was of opinion that his animals would be useless to him in that region he took the opportunity to swim the two ponies ashore, a distance of half a mile, for the ship could get no nearer and the sea-ice had gone.  Thus we started the winter with Campbell’s two ponies (Jehu and Chinaman), two ponies which had survived the Depot Journey (Nobby and James Pigg), and six ponies which had been left at Cape Evans (Snatcher, Snippets, Bones, Victor, Michael and Christopher) a total of ten.