It is impossible to express and almost impossible to imagine how difficult it was to make this decision.  Then we knew nothing:  now we know all.  And nothing is harder than to realize in the light of facts the doubts which others have experienced in the fog of uncertainty.

Our winter routine worked very smoothly.  Inside the hut we had a good deal more room than we needed, but this allowed of certain work being done in its shelter which would otherwise have had to be done outside.  For instance we cut a hole through the floor of the dark-room, and sledged in some heavy boulders of kenyte lava:  these were frozen solidly into the rock upon which the hut was built by the simple method of pouring hot water over them, and the pedestal so formed was used by Wright for his pendulum observations.  I was able to skin a number of birds in the hut; which, incidentally, was a very much colder place in consequence of the reduction in our numbers.

The wind was most turbulent during this winter.  The mean velocity of the wind, in miles per hour, for the month of May was 24.6 m.p.h.; for June 30.9 m.p.h.; and for July 29.5 m.p.h.  The percentage of hours when the wind was blowing over fresh gale strength (42 m.p.h. on the Beaufort scale) for the month of May was 24.5, for June 35, and for July 33 per cent of the whole.

These figures speak for themselves:  after May we lived surrounded by an atmosphere of raging winds and blinding drift, and the sea at our door was never allowed to freeze permanently.

After the blizzard in the beginning of May which I have already described, the ice round the point of Cape Evans and that in North Bay formed to a considerable thickness.  We put a thermometer screen out upon it, and Atkinson started a fish-trap through a hole in it.  There was a good deal of competition over this trap:  the seamen started a rival one, which was to have been a very large affair, though it narrowed down to a less ambitious business before it was finished.  There was a sound of cheering one morning, and Crean came in triumph from his fish-trap with a catch of 25.  Atkinson’s last catch had numbered one, but the seals had found his fishing-holes:  a new hole caught fish until a seal found it.  One of these fish, a Tremasome, had a parasitic growth over the dorsal sheath.  External parasites are not common in the Antarctic, and this was an interesting find.

On June 1 Dimitri and Hooper went with a team of nine dogs to and from Hut Point, to see if they could find Noogis, the dog which had left us on our return on May 1.  There was plenty of food for him to pick up there.  No trace of him could be found.  The party reported a bad running surface, no pressure in the ice, as was the case the former year, but a large open working crack running from Great Razorback to Tent Island.  There were big snowdrifts at Hut Point, as indeed was already the case at Cape Evans.  During the first days of June we got down into the minus thirties, and our spirits rose as the thermometer dropped:  we wanted permanent sea-ice.