But as Lillie squatted on the poop surrounded by an inner ring of jars and tangled masses of the catch, and an outer ring of curious scientists, pseudo-scientists and seamen, no find pleased him so much as the frequent discovery of pieces of Cephalodiscus rarus, of which even now there are but some four jars full in the world.  It is as interesting as it is uncommon, for its ancestor was a link between the vertebrates and invertebrates, though no one knows what it was like.  It has been a vertebrate and gone back, and now has the signs of a notochord in early life, and it also has gills.  First found on the Graham’s Land side of the Antarctic continent, it has only recently been discovered in the Ross Sea, and occurs nowhere else in the world so far as is known.

We left Granite Harbour in the early morning of January 23, and started to make our way out.  Our next job was to pick up the geological specimens at Evans Coves, where Campbell and his men had wintered in the igloo, and also to leave a depot there for future explorers.  We met very heavy pack, having to return at least twelve miles and try another way.  “The sea has been freezing out here, which seems an extraordinary thing at this time of year.  There was a thin layer of ice over the water between the floes this morning, and I feel sure that most of these big level floes, of which we have seen several, are the remains of ice which has frozen comparatively recently."[362] The propeller had a bad time, constantly catching up on ice.  At length we were some thirty miles north of Cape Bird making roughly towards Franklin Island.  That night we made good progress in fairly open water, and we passed Franklin Island during the day.  But the outlook was so bad in the evening (January 24) that we stopped and banked fires.  “We lay just where we stopped until at 5 A.M. on January 25, when the ice eased up sufficiently for us to get along, and we started to make the same slow progress—­slow ahead, stop (to the engine-room)—­bump and grind for a bit—­then slow astern, stop—­slow ahead again, and so on, until at 7 P.M., after one real big bump which brought the dinner some inches off the table, Cheetham brought us out into open water."[363]

Mount Nansen rose sheer and massive ahead of us with a table top, and at 3 A.M. on January 26 we were passing the dark brown granite headland of the northern foothills.  We were soon made fast to a stretch of some 500 yards of thick sea-ice, upon which the wind had not left a particle of snow, and before us the foothills formed that opening which Campbell had well named Hell’s Gate.