When the shore party came on board, Lieutenant Prestrud took up his old position as first officer; the others began duty at once.  All told, we were now twenty men on board, and after the Fram had sailed for a year rather short-handed, she could now be said to have a full crew again.  On this voyage we had no special work outside the usual sea routine, and so long as the weather was fair, we had thus a comparatively quiet life on board.  But the hours of watch on deck passed quickly enough, I expect; there was material in plenty for many a long chat now.  If we, who came from land, showed a high degree of curiosity about what had been going on in the world, the sea-party were at least as eager to have full information of every detail of our year-long stay on the Barrier.  One must almost have experienced something similar oneself to be able to form an idea of the hail of questions that is showered upon one on such an occasion.  What we land-lubbers had to relate has been given in outline in the preceding chapters.  Of the news we heard from outside, perhaps nothing interested us so much as the story of how the change in the plan of the expedition had been received at home and abroad.

It must have been at least a week before there was any noticeable ebb in the flood of questions and answers.  That week went by quickly; perhaps more quickly than we really cared for, since it proved that the Fram was not really able to keep pace with time.  The weather remained quite well behaved, but not exactly in the way we wished.  We had reckoned that the south-easterly and easterly winds, so frequent around Framheim, would also show themselves out in Ross Sea, but they entirely forgot to do so.  We had little wind, and when there was any, it was, as a rule, a slant from the north, always enough to delay our honest old ship.  It was impossible to take any observations for the first eight days, the sky was continuously overcast.  If one occasionally asked the skipper about her position, he usually replied that the only thing that could be said for certain was that we were in Ross Sea.  On February 7, however, according to a fairly good noon observation, we were well to the north of Cape Adare, and therefore beyond the limits of the Antarctic Continent.  On the way northward we passed Cape Adare at a distance hardly greater than could have been covered with a good day’s sailing; but our desire of making this detour had to give way to the chief consideration —­ northward, northward as quickly as possible.

There is usually plenty of wind in the neighbourhood of bold promontories, and Cape Adare is no exception in this respect; it is well known as a centre of bad weather.  Nor did we slip by without getting a taste of this; but it could not have been more welcome, as it happened that the wind was going the same way as ourselves.  Two days of fresh south-east wind took us comparatively quickly past the Balleny Islands, and on February 9 we could congratulate ourselves on being well out of the south frigid zone.  It was with joy that we had crossed the Antarctic Circle over a year ago, going south; perhaps we rejoiced no less at crossing it this time in the opposite direction.