What odd thrills the sight of the Antarctic Continent sent through most of us.  Land was first sighted late on New Year’s Eve and I think everybody had come on deck at the cry “Land oh!” To me those peaks always did and always will represent silent defiance; there were times when they made me shudder, but it is good to have looked upon them and to remember them in those post-War days of general discontent, for they remind me of the four Antarctic voyages which I have made and of the unanimous goodwill that obtained in each of the little wooden ships which were our homes for so long.  How infinitely distant those towering mountains seemed and how eternal their loneliness.

As we neared Cape Crozier Wilson became more and more interested.  He was dreadfully keen on the beach there being selected as a base, and his enthusiasm was infectious.  Certainly Scott was willing enough to try to effect a landing even apart from the advantage of having a new base.  The Cape Crozier beach would probably mean a shorter journey to the Pole, for we should be spared the crevasses which radiated from White Island and necessitated a big detour being made to avoid them.

As we proceeded the distant land appeared more plainly and we were able to admire and identify the various peaks of the snow-clad mountain range.  The year could not have opened more pleasantly.  We had church in a warm sun, with a temperature several degrees above freezing point, and most of us spent our off-time basking in the sunshine, yarning, skylarking, and being happy in general.

We tried to get a white-bellied whale on the 2nd January, but our whale-gun did not seem to have any buck in it and the harpoon dribbled out a fraction of the distance it was expected to travel.

The same glorious weather continued on January 2, and Oates took five of the ponies on to the upper deck and got their stables cleared out.  The poor animals had had no chance of being taken from their stalls for thirty-eight days, and their boxes were between two and three feet deep with manure.  The four ponies stabled on the upper deck looked fairly well but were all stiff in their legs.

Rennick took soundings every forty or fifty miles in the Ross Sea, the depth varying from 357 fathoms comparatively close up to Cape Crozier to 180 fathoms in latitude 73 degrees.

Cape Crozier itself was sighted after breakfast on the 3rd, and the Great Ice Barrier appeared like a thin line on the southern horizon at 11.30 that morning.  We were close to the Cape by lunch time, and by 1.30 we had furled sail in order to manoeuvre more freely.  The “Terra Nova” steamed close up to the face of the Barrier, then along to the westward until we arrived in a little bay where the Barrier joins Cape Crozier.  Quite a tide was washing past the cliff faces of the ice; it all looked very white, like chalk, while the sun was near the northern horizon, but later in the afternoon blue and green shadows