The following day the same routine was continued and nearly the whole of the provision cases came ashore and were stacked in neat little piles under Bowers’s direction.  This indefatigable little worker now devoted himself entirely to the western party stores.  He knew every case and all about it.  Each one weighed approximately 60 lb.  We had purposely arranged that this should be so when ordering stores in London to save weight and space.  The cases were made of Venesta 3-ply wood.  Of course, the instruments and heavier scientific gear could not stow in these handy packages, but the sixty-pound-Venesta was adhered to whenever possible.  The ponies were not worked till the afternoon of the 6th, and then only the best of them with light loads.

Davis, the carpenter, had with him seaman Ford, Keohane, and Abbot.  Their routine was a little different from ours:  they worked at hut building from 7 a.m. till midnight usually, and their results were little short of marvellous.  Odd people helped them when they could, and of these Pouting showed himself to be facile princeps as carpenter.  I never saw anything like the speed in which he set up tongued and grooved match boarding.

Day, Nelson, and Lashly worked with the motor sledges; the newest motor frequently towed loads of 2500 lb. over the ice at a six mile an hour speed.  The oldest hauled a ton and managed six double trips a day.  Day, the motor engineer, had been down here before—­both he and Priestley came from the Shackleton Expedition.  The former had a decidedly comic vein which made him popular all round.  From start to finish Day showed himself to be the most undefeated sportsman, and it was not his fault that the motor sledges did badly in the end.

Perhaps my diary from January 7, 1911, to the 8th gives a good idea of the progress we were making with the base station and of the general working day here.  It reads as follows: 

   “Saturday, January 7, 1911.

   “All hands hard at work landing stores.  Meares and Dimitri running dog
   teams to and fro for light gear.

“Captain Scott, Dr. Wilson, Griffith Taylor, Debenham, Cherry-Garrard, and Browning leading ponies.  Campbell, Levick, and Priestley hauling sledges with colossal energy and enormous loads, the majority of the ship’s party unloading stores; Bowers, two seamen, Atkinson, and I unloading sledges on the beach and carrying their contents up to their assigned positions, Simpson and Wright laying the foundations for a magnetic hut, and so on.  Every one happy and keen, working as incessantly as ants.  I took on the job of ice inspector, and three or four times a day I go out and inspect the ice, building snow bridges over the tide cracks and thin places.  The ice, excepting the floe to which the ship is fast, is several feet thick.  The floe by the ’Terra Nova’ is very thin and rather doubtful.  We, ashore, had dinner at 10 p.m. and turned in about 11.”

But the following day, although included here, was by no means typical.