The Weddell seal is black on top, and splashed with silver in other places.  He measures up to 10 feet from nose to tail, eats fish, is corpulent and hulking.  He sometimes carries four inches of blubber.  On the ice he is one of the most sluggish of God’s creatures, he sleeps continually, digests huge meals, and grunts, gurgles, pipes, trills and whistles in the most engaging way.  In the sea he is transformed into one of the most elastic and lithe of beasts, catching his fish and swallowing them whole.  As you stand over his blow-hole his head appears, and he snorts at you with surprise but no fear, opening and shutting his nostrils the while as he takes in a supply of fresh air.  It is clear that they travel for many miles beneath the ice, and I expect they find their way from air-hole to air-hole by listening to the noise made by other seals.  Some of the air-holes are exit and entrance holes as well, and I found at least one seal which appeared to have died owing to its opening freezing up.  They may be heard at times grinding these holes open with their teeth (Ponting took some patient cinematographs showing the process of sawing the openings to these wells) and their teeth are naturally much worn by the time they become old.  Wilson states that they are liable to kidney trouble:  their skin is often irritable, which may be due to the drying salt from the sea; and I have seen one seal which was covered with a suppurating rash.  Their spleens are sometimes enormously enlarged when they first come out of the sea on to the ice, which is interesting because no one seems to know much about spleens.  Speculation was caused amongst us by the fact that some of these air-holes had as it were a trap-door above them.  One day I was on the ice-foot at Cape Evans at a time when North Bay was frozen over with about an inch or more of ice.  A seal suddenly poked his nose up through this ice to get air, and when he disappeared a slab which had been raised by his head fell back into this trap position.  Clearly this was the origin of the door.

Weddell seals and the Hut Point life are inextricably mixed up in my recollections of October.  Atkinson, Debenham, Dimitri and I went down to Hut Point on the 12th, with the two dog-teams.  We were to run two depots out on to the Barrier, and Debenham, whose leg prevented his further sledging, was to do geological work and a plane table survey.  Those of us who had borne the brunt of the travelling of the two previous sledge seasons were sick of sledging.  For my own part I confess I viewed the whole proceedings with distaste, and I have no doubt the others did too; but the job had to be done if possible, and there was no good in saying we were sick of it.  From beginning to end of this year men not only laboured willingly, but put their hearts and souls into the work.  To have to do another three months’ journey seemed bad enough, and to leave our comfortable Winter Quarters three weeks before we started on that journey