I believe both Anton and Dimitri, the Russian dog driver, were brought originally to look after the ponies and dogs on their way from Siberia to New Zealand.  But they proved such good fellows and so useful that we were very glad to take them on the strength of the landing party.  I fear that Anton, at any rate, did not realize what he was in for.  When we arrived at Cape Crozier in the ship on our voyage south, and he saw the two great peaks of Ross Island in front and the Barrier Cliff disappearing in an unbroken wall below the eastern horizon, he imagined that he reached the South Pole, and was suitably elated.  When the darkness of the winter closed down upon us, this apparently unnatural order of things so preyed upon his superstitious mind that he became seriously alarmed.  Where the sea-ice joined the land in front of the hut was of course a working crack, caused by the rise and fall of the tide.  Sometimes the sea-water found its way up, and Anton was convinced that the weird phosphorescent lights which danced up out of the sea were devils.  In propitiation we found that he had sacrificed to them his most cherished luxury, his scanty allowance of cigarettes, which he had literally cast upon the waters in the darkness.  It was natural that his thoughts should turn to the comforts of his Siberian home, and the one-legged wife whom he was going to marry there, and when it became clear that a another year would be spent in the South his mind was troubled.  And so he went to Oates and asked him, “If I go away at the end of this year, will Captain Scott disinherit me?” In order to try and express his idea, for he knew little English, he had some days before been asking “what we called it when a father died and left his son nothing.”  Poor Anton!

He looked long and anxiously for the ship, and with his kit-bag on his shoulder was amongst the first to trek across the ice to meet her.  Having asked for and obtained a job of work there was no happier man on board:  he never left her until she reached New Zealand.  Nevertheless he was always cheerful, always working, and a most useful addition to our small community.

It is still usual to talk of people living in complete married happiness when we really mean, so Mr. Bernard Shaw tells me, that they confine their quarrels to Thursday nights.  If then I say that we lived this life for nearly three years, from the day when we left England until the day we returned to New Zealand, without any friction of any kind, I shall be supposed to be making a formal statement of somewhat limited truth.  May I say that there is really no formality about it, and nothing but the truth.  To be absolutely accurate I must admit to having seen a man in a very ‘prickly’ state on one occasion.  That was all.  It didn’t last and may have been well justified for aught I know:  I have forgotten what it was all about.  Why we should have been more fortunate than polar travellers in general it is hard to say, but undoubtedly a very powerful reason was that we had no idle hours:  there was no time to quarrel.