We also revised our food rations.  From the moment we started to prepare for this journey we were asked by Scott to try certain experiments in view of the Plateau stage of the Polar Journey the following summer.  It was supposed that the Plateau stage would be the really tough part of the Polar Journey, and no one then dreamed that harder conditions could be found in the middle of the Barrier in March than on the Plateau, ten thousand feet higher, in February.  In view of the extreme conditions we knew we must meet on this winter journey, far harder of course in point of weather than anything experienced on the Polar Journey, we had determined to simplify our food to the last degree.  We only brought pemmican, biscuit, butter and tea:  and tea is not a food, only a pleasant stimulant, and hot:  the pemmican was excellent and came from Beauvais, Copenhagen.

[Illustration:  CAMP WORK IN A BLIZZARD, PASSING IN THE COOKER—­E.  A. Wilson, del.]

The immediate advantage of this was that we had few food bags to handle for each meal.  If the air temperature is 100 degrees of frost, then everything in the air is about 100 degrees of frost too.  You have only to untie the lashings of one bag in a -70 deg. temperature, with your feet frozen and your fingers just nursed back after getting a match to strike for the candle (you will have tried several boxes—­metal), to realize this as an advantage.

The immediate and increasingly pressing disadvantage is that you have no sugar.  Have you ever had a craving for sugar which never leaves you, even when asleep?  It is unpleasant.  As a matter of fact the craving for sweet things never seriously worried us on this journey, and there must have been some sugar in our biscuits which gave a pleasant sweetness to our mid-day tea or nightly hot water when broken up and soaked in it.  These biscuits were specially made for us by Huntley and Palmer:  their composition was worked out by Wilson and that firm’s chemist, and is a secret.  But they are probably the most satisfying biscuit ever made, and I doubt whether they can be improved upon.  There were two kinds, called Emergency and Antarctic, but there was I think little difference between them except in the baking.  A well-baked biscuit was good to eat when sledging if your supply of food was good:  but if you were very hungry an underbaked one was much preferred.  By taking individually different quantities of biscuit, pemmican and butter we were able roughly to test the proportions of proteids, fats and carbo-hydrates wanted by the human body under such extreme circumstances.  Bill was all for fat, starting with 8 oz. butter, 12 oz. pemmican and only 12 oz. biscuit a day.  Bowers told me he was going for proteids, 16 oz. pemmican and 16 oz. biscuit, and suggested I should go the whole hog on carbo-hydrates.  I did not like this, since I knew I should want more fat, but the rations were to be altered as necessary during the journey, so there was no harm in trying.  So I started with 20 oz. of biscuit and 12 oz. of pemmican a day.