This party hung on with their exploration work until prudence told them that they must return from the Koettlitz Glacier before the season closed in.  Their return trip led them along the edge of the almost impenetrable pinnacle of ice which is one of the wonders of the Antarctic.  Their journey led them also through extraordinary and difficult ice-fields that even surprised the veteran sledger Evans.  Their final march took them along the edge of the Great Ice Barrier and brought them to Hut Point on March 14.

We now numbered sixteen at this congested station; the sun was very little above the horizon and gales were so bad that spray dashed over the small hut occasionally, whilst all round the low-lying parts of the coast wonderful spray ridges of ice were formed.  We had our proportion of blizzard days and suffered somewhat from the cold, for it was rarely calm.  Some of us began to long for the greater comforts of the Cape Evans Hut; there was no day, no hour in fact, when some one did not climb up the hillock which was surmounted by the little wooden cross put up in memory of Seaman Vince of the “Discovery” expedition, to see and note the ice conditions.

Winter was coming fast and night shadows of cruel dark purple added to the natural gloom of Hut Point and its environments.  Wilson was the one man amongst us who profited most from our sojourn here.  In spite of bad light and almost frozen fingers he managed to make an astonishing collection of sketches, portraying the autumn scenes near this corner of Ross Isle.  How sinister and relentless the western mountains looked, how cold and unforgiving the foothills, and how ashy gray the sullen icefoots that girt this sad, frozen land.

There was, of course, no privacy in the crowded hut-space, and when evening came it was sometimes rather a relief to get away to some sheltered corner and look out over the Sound.  The twilight shades and colours were beautiful in a sad sort of way, but the stillness was awful.  Whenever the wind fell light new ice would form which seemed to crack and be churned up with every cat’s-paw of wind.  The currents and tidal streams would slowly carry these pancakes of ice up and down the Strait until the weather was calm enough and cold enough to cement them together till they formed floes, which in their turn froze fast into great white icefields strong enough to bear us and any weights we liked to take along.  One often turned in, confident that a passage could be made over the frozen sea to Glacier Tongue at least, but in the morning everything would be changed and absolutely no ice would be visible floating in the sea.  When Taylor’s party had rested a little at Hut Point they threw in their lot with the rest of us and made occasional trips out on the silent Barrier as far as Corner Camp, to add sledge loads of provisions now and again to the stores already depoted there in readiness for the southern sledge journey, on which we built our hopes for ultimate triumph.