the moment and saw him fall.  I pulled him down the slope to his tent and pushed him into its shelter with orders to his tent-mates to keep him in his sleeping-bag until I allowed him to come out or the doctors said he was fit enough.  Then I took out to replace the cook one of the men who had expressed a desire to lie down and die.  The task of keeping the galley fire alight was both difficult and strenuous, and it took his thoughts away from the chances of immediate dissolution.  In fact, I found him a little later gravely concerned over the drying of a naturally not over-clean pair of socks which were hung up in close proximity to our evening milk.  Occupation had brought his thoughts back to the ordinary cares of life.

There was a lull in the bad weather on April 21, and the carpenter started to collect material for the decking of the ‘James Caird’.  He fitted the mast of the ‘Stancomb Wills’ fore and aft inside the ’James Caird’ as a hog-back and thus strengthened the keel with the object of preventing our boat “hogging”—­that is, buckling in heavy seas.  He had not sufficient wood to provide a deck, but by using the sledge-runners and box-lids he made a framework extending from the forecastle aft to a well.  It was a patched-up affair, but it provided a base for a canvas covering.  We had a bolt of canvas frozen stiff, and this material had to be cut and then thawed out over the blubber-stove, foot by foot, in order that it might be sewn into the form of a cover.  When it had been nailed and screwed into position it certainly gave an appearance of safety to the boat, though I had an uneasy feeling that it bore a strong likeness to stage scenery, which may look like a granite wall and is in fact nothing better than canvas and lath.  As events proved, the covering served its purpose well.  We certainly could not have lived through the voyage without it.

Another fierce gale was blowing on April 22, interfering with our preparations for the voyage.  The cooker from No. 5 tent came adrift in a gust, and, although it was chased to the water’s edge, it disappeared for good.  Blackborrow’s feet were giving him much pain, and McIlroy and Macklin thought it would be necessary for them to operate soon.  They were under the impression then that they had no chloroform, but they found some subsequently in the medicine-chest after we had left.  Some cases of stores left on a rock off the spit on the day of our arrival were retrieved during this day.  We were setting aside stores for the boat journey and choosing the essential equipment from the scanty stock at our disposal.  Two ten-gallon casks had to be filled with water melted down from ice collected at the foot of the glacier.  This was a rather slow business.  The blubber-stove was kept going all night, and the watchmen emptied the water into the casks from the pot in which the ice was melted.  A working party started to dig a hole in the snow-slope about forty feet above sea-level with the object of providing a site for a camp.  They made fairly good progress at first, but the snow drifted down unceasingly from the inland ice, and in the end the party had to give up the project.