Their worst difficulties were scurvy[29] and ptomaine poisoning, for which the enforced diet was responsible.  From the first they decided to keep nearly all their unused rations for sledging down the coast in the following spring, and this meant that they must live till then on the seal and penguin which they could kill.  The first dysentery was early in the winter, and was caused by using the salt from the sea-water.  They had some Cerebos salt, however, in their sledging rations, and used it for a week, which stopped the disorder and they gradually got used to the sea-ice salt.  Browning, however, who had had enteric fever in the past, had dysentery almost continually right through the winter.  Had he not been the plucky, cheerful man he is, he would have died.

In June again there was another bad attack of dysentery.  Another thing which worried them somewhat was the ‘igloo back,’ a semi-permanent kink caused by seldom being able to stand upright.

Then, in the beginning of September, they had ptomaine poisoning from meat which had been too long in what they called the oven, which was a biscuit box, hung over the blubber stove, into which they placed the frozen meat to thaw it out.  This oven was found to be not quite level, and in a corner a pool of old blood, water and scraps of meat had collected.  This and a tainted hoosh which they did not have the strength of mind to throw away in their hungry condition, seems to have caused the outbreak, which was severe.  Browning and Dickason were especially bad.

They had their bad days:  those first days of realization that they would not be relieved:  days of depression, disease and hunger, all at once:  when the seal seemed as if they would give out and they were thinking they would have to travel down the coast in the winter—­but Abbott killed two seals with a greasy knife, losing the use of three fingers in the process, and saved the situation.

But they also had their good, or less-bad, days:  such was mid-winter night when they held food in their hands and did not want to eat it, for they were full:  or when they got through the Te Deum without a hitch:  or when they killed some penguins; or got a ration of mustard plaster from the medical stores.

Never was a more cheerful or good-tempered party.  They set out to see the humorous side of everything, and, if they could not do so one day, at any rate they determined to see to it the next.  What is more they succeeded, and I have never seen a company of better welded men than that which joined us for those last two months in McMurdo Sound.

On September 30 they started home—­so they called it.  This meant a sledge journey of some two hundred miles along the coast, and its possibility depended upon the presence of sea-ice, which we have seen to have been absent at Evans Coves.  It also meant crossing the Drygalski Ice Tongue, an obstacle which bulked very formidably in their imaginations during the winter.  They reached the last rise of this glacier in the evening of October 10, and then saw Erebus, one hundred and fifty miles off.  The igloo and the past were behind:  Cape Evans and the future were in front—­and the sea-ice was in as far as they could see.