Among other equipment I must mention our excellent Primus cooking apparatus.  This all came complete from a firm in Stockholm.  For cooking on sledge journeys the Primus stove ranks above all others; it gives a great deal of heat, uses little oil, and requires no attention —­ advantages which are important enough anywhere, but especially when sledging.  There is never any trouble with this apparatus; it has come as near perfection as possible.  We took five Nansen cookers with us.  This cooker utilizes the heat more completely than any other; but I have one objection to make to it —­ it takes up space.  We used it on our depot journeys, but were unfortunately obliged to give it up on the main southern journey.  We were so many in a tent, and space was so limited, that I dared not risk using it.  If one has room enough, it is ideal in my opinion.

We had with us ten pairs of snow-shoes and one hundred sets of dog-harness of the Alaska Eskimo pattern.  The Alaska Eskimo drive their dogs in tandem; the whole pull is thus straight ahead in the direction the sledge is going, and this is undoubtedly the best way of utilizing the power.  I had made up my mind to adopt the same system in sledging on the Barrier.  Another great advantage it had was that the dogs would pass singly across fissures, so that the danger of falling through was considerably reduced.  The exertion of pulling is also less trying with Alaska harness than with the Greenland kind, as the Alaska harness has a shallow, padded collar, which is slipped over the animal’s head and makes the weight of the pull come on his shoulders, whereas the Greenland harness presses on his chest.  Raw places, which occur rather frequently with the Greenland harness, are almost entirely avoided with the other.  All the sets of harness were made in the navy workshops, and after their long and hard use they are as good as ever.  There could be no better recommendation than this.

Of instruments and apparatus for the sledge journeys we carried two sextants, three artificial horizons, of which two were glass horizons with dark glasses, and one a mercury horizon, and four spirit compasses, made in Christiania.  They were excellent little compasses, but unfortunately useless in cold weather —­ that is to say, when the temperature went below -40deg.  F.; at this point the liquid froze.  I had drawn the maker’s attention to this beforehand and asked him to use as pure a spirit as possible.  What his object was I still do not know, but the spirit he employed was highly dilute.  The best proof of this was that the liquid in our compasses froze before the spirits in a flask.  We were naturally inconvenienced by this.  Besides these we had an ordinary little pocket-compass, two pairs of binoculars, one by Zeiss and the other by Goertz, and snow-goggles from Dr. Schanz.  We had various kinds of glasses for these, so that we could change when we were tired of one colour.  During the whole stay on the Barrier I myself wore