At 7 p.m. on the 16th we were somewhat surprised to see a vessel bearing down.  For my part, I guessed her to be the Aurora, Dr. Mawson’s ship.  She came very slowly, but at last what should we see but the Japanese flag!  I had no idea that expedition was out again.  The ship came right in, went past us twice and moored alongside the loose ice.  Immediately afterwards ten men armed with picks and shovels went up the Barrier, while the rest rushed wildly about after penguins, and their shots were heard all night.  Next morning the commander of the Kainan Maru, whose name was Homura, came on board.  The same day a tent was set up on the edge of the Barrier, and cases, sledges, and so on, were put out on the ice.  Kainan Maru means, I have been told, “the ship that opens the South.”

Prestrud and I went on board her later in the day, to see what she was like, but we met neither the leader of the expedition nor the captain of the ship.  Prestrud had the cinematograph apparatus with him, and a lot of photographs were also taken.

The leader of the Japanese expedition has written somewhere or other that the reason of Shackleton’s losing all his ponies was that the ponies were not kept in tents at night, but had to lie outside.  He thought the ponies ought to be in the tents and the men outside.  From this one would think they were great lovers of animals, but I must confess that was not the impression I received.  They had put penguins into little boxes to take them alive to Japan!  Round about the deck lay dead and half-dead skua gulls in heaps.  On the ice close to the vessel was a seal ripped open, with part of its entrails on the ice; but the seal was still alive.  Neither Prestrud nor I had any sort of weapon that we could kill the seal with, so we asked the Japanese to do it, but they only grinned and laughed.  A little way off two of them were coming across the ice with a seal in front of them; they drove it on with two long poles, with which they pricked it when it would not go.  If it fell into a crack, they dug it up again as you would see men quarrying stone at home; it had not enough life in it to be able to escape its tormentors.  All this was accompanied by laughter and jokes.  On arrival at the ship the animal was nearly dead, and it was left there till it expired.

On the 19th we had a fresh south-westerly wind and a lot of ice went out.  The Japanese were occupied most of the night in going round among the floes and picking up men, dogs, cases, and so on, as they had put a good deal on to the ice in the course of the day.  As the ice came out, so the Fram went in, right up to fat. 78deg.35’ S., while the Kainan Maru drifted farther and farther out, till at last she disappeared.  Nor did we see the vessel again, but a couple of men with a tent stayed on the Barrier as long as we were in the bay.