“We had not long to wait, and, much as we wished to go ahead, had to turn back.  I went into a small crevasse; no damage.  Arriving back at the place where we left the boat we found it had not returned, so sat down under an overhang and smoked and enjoyed the sense of loneliness.  Soon the boat appeared out of the mist, and the crew had much news for us.  After we left the ship the captain manoeuvred her in order to get close to the Barrier, but, unfortunately, the engines were loath to be reversed when required to go astern and the ship hit the Barrier end on.  The Barrier here is about twenty feet high, and her jib-boom took the weight and snapped at the cap.  When I returned Thompson was busy getting the broken boom and gear aboard.  Luckily the cap was not broken and no damage was done aloft, but it was rather a bad introduction to the Antarctic.  There is no place to land the Cape Crozier hut and stores, so we must build a hut in the winter here, which will mean so much extra sledging from winter quarters.  Bad start, good finish!  Joyce and I went aloft to the crow’s-nest, but could see no opening in the Barrier to eastward where a ship might enter and get farther south.”

Mackintosh proceeded into McMurdo Sound.  Heavy pack delayed the ship for three days, and it was not until January 16 that she reached a point off Cape Evans, where he landed ten tons of coal and ninety-eight cases of oil.  During succeeding days Captain Mackintosh worked the ‘Aurora’ southward, and by January 24 he was within nine miles of Hut Point.  There he made the ship fast to sea-ice, then breaking up rapidly, and proceeded to arrange sledging parties.  It was his intention to direct the laying of the depots himself and to leave his first officer, Lieut.  J. R. Stenhouse, in command of the ‘Aurora’, with instructions to select a base and land a party.

The first objective was Hut Point, where stands the hut erected by the Discovery expedition in 1902.  An advance party, consisting of Joyce (in charge), Jack, and Gaze, with dogs and fully loaded sledges, left the ship on January 24; Mackintosh, with Wild and Smith, followed the next day; and a supporting party, consisting of Cope (in charge), Stevens, Ninnis, Haywood, Hooke, and Richards, left the ship on January 30.  The first two parties had dog teams.  The third party took with it the motor-tractor, which does not appear to have given the good service that I had hoped to get from it.  These parties had a strenuous time during the weeks that followed.  The men, fresh from shipboard, were not in the best of training, and the same was true of the dogs.  It was unfortunate that the dogs had to be worked so early after their arrival in the Antarctic.  They were in poor condition and they had not learned to work together as teams.  The result was the loss of many of the dogs, and this proved a serious matter in the following season.  Captain Mackintosh’s record of the sledging in the early months of 1915 is fairly full.  It will not be necessary here to follow the fortunes of the various parties in detail, for although the men were facing difficulties and dangers, they were on well-travelled ground, which has been made familiar to most readers by the histories of earlier Expeditions.