Several wall-faced glaciers are visible, but according to Campbell none are possible to climb on to, nor do they lead up to the inland plateau.  On this account the party were unable to accomplish any serious sledging whilst landed here.  Other things were undertaken, and the members did excellent meteorological, geological, and magnetic work, while Campbell himself made some good surveys.  Priestley has added, greatly to our geological knowledge, and he, with his previous Antarctic experience, made himself invaluable to his chief.  The Aurora observations show much more variegated results than we got at Cape Evans, where, as pointed out, there was a great absence of colour beyond pale yellow in the displays.

The principal drawback of the beach here was its covering of guano and manure dust from the myriads of penguins and their predecessors.  I had gone ashore at Cape Adare as a sub-lieutenant on January 8, 1903, to leave a record, and I remember that we had literally to trample on the penguins to get across the beach to Borchgrevink’s hut—­how interesting it all was, my first landing on this inhospitable continent:  my impressions left a wonderful memory of mouse-coloured, woolly little young of the Adelie penguin—­I even remember taking one away and trying unsuccessfully to bring it up.  It must have taken Campbell’s crew a long time to get accustomed to the pungent odour thereabouts.  Levick dressed the ground with bleaching powder to help dispel that dreadful odour of guano before Campbell’s men put down their hut floor.

There is little to be set down concerning the Cape Adare winter—­the routine much resembled our own winter routine at Cape Evans; it was much warmer, however, and being six degrees farther north the sun left the party nearly a month later and returned the same amount earlier; they had little more than two months with the sun below the horizon in fact.

There is a certain amount of quiet humour about Campbell’s record; for instance, he states that they used their “pram” or Norwegian skiff and tried trawling for biological specimens on March 27—­“our total catch was one sea-louse, one sea-slug, and one spider.”

It is very interesting to note that in March they had Aurora in which “an arc of yellow stretched from N.W. to N.E., while a green and red curtain extended from the N.W. horizon to the zenith.”

The “pram” was Campbell’s gift to the Expedition.  He was always alive in the matter of small boats and their uses, and he was the first to use “kayaks” by making canvas boats to fit round the sledges; these were light enough and might have well been used by us in the Main Party.  Had poor Mackintosh possessed one in Shackleton’s last expedition he and his companions would probably have saved themselves—­if they had carried a canvas cover on a sledge with them however it is always easy to be wise after the event.

Levick’s medical duties were very light indeed:  they included the stopping of one of Campbell’s teeth, and the latter says, “As he had been flensing a seal a few days before, his fingers tasted strongly of blubber.”