Meanwhile Shackleton’s old hut was very pleasant at this time of year:  in winter it was a bit too draughty.  With bright sunlight, a lop on the sea which splashed and gurgled under the ice-foot, the beautiful mountains all round us, and the penguins nesting at our door, this was better than the Beardmore Glacier, where we had expected to be at this date.  What then must it have been to the six men who were just returned from the very Gate of Hell?  And the food:  “Truly Shackleton’s men must have fed like turkey-cocks from all the delicacies here:  boiled chicken, kidneys, mushrooms, ginger, Garibaldi biscuits, soups of all kinds:  it is a splendid change.  Best of all are the fresh-buttered skua’s eggs which we make for breakfast.  In fact, life is bearable with all that has been unknown so long at last cleared up, and our anxieties for Campbell’s party laid at rest."[356]

For three weeks I worked among the Adelie penguins at Cape Royds, and obtained a complete series of their embryos.  It was always Wilson’s idea that embryology was the next job of a vertebral zoologist down south.  I have already explained that the penguin is an interesting link in the evolutionary chain, and the object of getting this embryo is to find out where the penguins come in.[357] Whether or no they are more primitive than other nonflying birds, such as the apteryx, the ostrich, the rhea and the moa, which last is only just extinct, is an open question.  But wingless birds are still hanging on to the promontories of the southern continents, where there is less rivalry than in the highly populated land areas of the north.  It may be that penguins are descended from ancestors who lived in the northern hemisphere in a winged condition (even now you may sometimes see them try to fly), and that they have been driven towards the south.

If penguins are primitive, it is rational to infer that the most primitive penguin is farthest south.  These are the two Antarcticists, the Emperor and the Adelie.  The latter appears to be the more numerous and successful of the two, and for this reason we are inclined to search among the Emperors as being among the most primitive penguins, if not the most primitive of birds now living:  hence the Winter Journey.  I was glad to get, in addition, this series of Adelie penguins’ embryos, feeling somewhat like a giant who had wandered on to the wrong planet, and who was distinctly in the way of its true inhabitants.

We returned too late to see the eggs laid, and therefore it was impossible to tell how old the embryos were.  My hopes rose, however, when I saw some eggless nests with penguins sitting upon them, but later I found that these were used as bachelor quarters by birds whose wives were sitting near.  I tried taking eggs from nests and was delighted to find that new eggs appeared:  these I carefully marked, and it was not until I opened one two days later to find inside an embryo at least two weeks old, that I realized that penguins added baby-snatching to their other immoralities.  Some of those from whom I took eggs sat upon stones of a similar size and shape with every appearance of content:  one sat upon the half of the red tin of a Dutch cheese.  They are not very intelligent.