Occasionally the ghostly shadows of silver, snow, and fulmar petrels flashed close to us, and all around we could hear the killers blowing, their short, sharp hisses sounding like sudden escapes of steam.  The killers were a source of anxiety, for a boat could easily have been capsized by one of them coming up to blow.  They would throw aside in a nonchalant fashion pieces of ice much bigger than our boats when they rose to the surface, and we had an uneasy feeling that the white bottoms of the boats would look like ice from below.  Shipwrecked mariners drifting in the Antarctic seas would be things not dreamed of in the killers’ philosophy, and might appear on closer examination to be tasty substitutes for seal and penguin.  We certainly regarded the killers with misgivings.

Early in the morning of April 12 the weather improved and the wind dropped.  Dawn came with a clear sky, cold and fearless.  I looked around at the faces of my companions in the ‘James Caird’ and saw pinched and drawn features.  The strain was beginning to tell.  Wild sat at the rudder with the same calm, confident expression that he would have worn under happier conditions; his steel-blue eyes looked out to the day ahead.  All the people, though evidently suffering, were doing their best to be cheerful, and the prospect of a hot breakfast was inspiriting.  I told all the boats that immediately we could find a suitable floe the cooker would be started and hot milk and Bovril would soon fix everybody up.  Away we rowed to the westward through open pack, floes of all shapes and sizes on every side of us, and every man not engaged in pulling looking eagerly for a suitable camping-place.  I could gauge the desire for food of the different members by the eagerness they displayed in pointing out to me the floes they considered exactly suited to our purpose.  The temperature was about 10° Fahr., and the Burberry suits of the rowers crackled as the men bent to the oars.  I noticed little fragments of ice and frost falling from arms and bodies.  At eight o’clock a decent floe appeared ahead and we pulled up to it.  The galley was landed, and soon the welcome steam rose from the cooking food as the blubber-stove flared and smoked.  Never did a cook work under more anxious scrutiny.  Worsley, Crean, and I stayed in our respective boats to keep them steady and prevent collisions with the floe, since the swell was still running strong, but the other men were able to stretch their cramped limbs and run to and fro “in the kitchen,” as somebody put it.  The sun was now rising gloriously.  The Burberry suits were drying and the ice was melting off our beards.  The steaming food gave us new vigour, and within three-quarters of an hour we were off again to the west with all sails set.  We had given an additional sail to the ‘Stancomb Wills’ and she was able to keep up pretty well.  We could see that we were on the true pack-edge, with the blue, rolling sea just outside the fringe of ice to the north.  White-capped waves vied with the glittering floes in the setting of blue water, and countless seals basked and rolled on every piece of ice big enough to form a raft.