Eight of us went out for a week’s sledging on March 16, but the temperatures were now becoming too low to be pleasant and touching 40 degrees or so below zero.  What tried us more than anything else was thick weather and the fearfully bad light on days when no landmarks were visible to guide us to the depot.  Our sleeping-bags also were frozen and uncomfortable, thick rime collecting on the insides of our tents which every puff of wind would shake down in a shower of ice.  When sitting round on our rolled-up sleeping-bags at meal times we could not help our heads and shoulders brushing off patches of this frost rime, which soon accumulated in the fur of the sleeping-bags and made life at night a clammy misery.  The surfaces were very heavy, and dragging even light sledges when returning from the depot proved a laborious business.

This autumn time gave a series of gales and strong winds with scarcely ever more than a few hours of calm or gentle breeze, sandwiched in between.  Sometimes we used ski, but there are occasions when ski are quite useless, owing to snow binding in great clogs underneath them.  The Norwegians use different kinds of paraffin wax and compositions of tar and other ingredients for overcoming this difficulty.  Gran had brought from Christiania the best of these compositions, nevertheless there were days when whatever we put on we had difficulty with ski and had to cast them aside.  There were people who preferred foot-slogging to ski at any time, and there were certainly days when teams on foot would literally dance round men pulling on ski.  In the light of experience, however, the expert ski-runner has enormous advantage over the “foot-slogger,” however good an athlete.

What strikes me here is the dreadful similarity in weather condition, wind, temperature, etc., surface and visibility to that which culminated in the great disaster of our expedition and resulted in poor Scott’s death exactly a year later.  Here is a day taken haphazard from my diary: 

   “From Corner Camp to Hut Point: 

“March 18, 1911.—­Called the hands at 6.15 and after a fine warming breakfast started off on ski.  The light was simply awful and the surface very bad, but we did six miles, then lunched.  After lunch carried on with a strong wind blowing, but after very heavy dragging we were forced to camp when only nine and a half miles had been laid between us—­we really couldn’t see ten yards.  Just after we camped the wind increased to about force 6, alternately freshening up and dying away, and a good deal of snow fell.  Temperature 32.5 below zero.”

One year later Scott was facing weather conditions and surfaces almost identical, but the difference lay in that he had marched more than sixteen hundred miles, was short of food, and his party were suffering from the tragic loss of two of their companions and the intense disappointment of having made this great sledge journey for their country’s honour to find that all their efforts had been in vain, and that they had been anticipated by men who had borne thither the flag of another nation.