Dredging for specimens at various depths was one of the duties during these days.  The dredge and several hundred fathoms of wire line made a heavy load, far beyond the unaided strength of the scientists.  On the 23rd, for example, we put down a 2 ft. dredge and 650 fathoms of wire.  The dredge was hove in four hours later and brought much glacial mud, several pebbles and rock fragments, three sponges, some worms, brachiapods, and foraminiferae.  The mud was troublesome.  It was heavy to lift, and as it froze rapidly when brought to the surface, the recovery of the specimens embedded in it was difficult.  A haul made on the 26th brought a prize for the geologist in the form of a lump of sandstone weighing 75 lbs., a piece of fossiliferous limestone, a fragment of striated shale, sandstone-grit, and some pebbles.  Hauling in the dredge by hand was severe work, and on the 24th we used the Girling tractor-motor, which brought in 500 fathoms of line in thirty minutes, including stops.  One stop was due to water having run over the friction gear and frozen.  It was a day or two later that we heard a great yell from the floe and found Clark dancing about and shouting Scottish war-cries.  He had secured his first complete specimen of an Antarctic fish, apparently a new species.

Mirages were frequent.  Barrier-cliffs appeared all around us on the 29th, even in places where we knew there was deep water.

“Bergs and pack are thrown up in the sky and distorted into the most fantastic shapes.  They climb, trembling, upwards, spreading out into long lines at different levels, then contract and fall down, leaving nothing but an uncertain, wavering smudge which comes and goes.  Presently the smudge swells and grows, taking shape until it presents the perfect inverted reflection of a berg on the horizon, the shadow hovering over the substance.  More smudges appear at different points on the horizon.  These spread out into long lines till they meet, and we are girdled by lines of shining snow-cliffs, laved at their bases by waters of illusion in which they appear to be faithfully reflected.  So the shadows come and go silently, melting away finally as the sun declines to the west.  We seem to be drifting helplessly in a strange world of unreality.  It is reassuring to feel the ship beneath one’s feet and to look down at the familiar line of kennels and igloos on the solid floe.”

The floe was not so solid as it appeared.  We had reminders occasionally that the greedy sea was very close, and that the floe was but a treacherous friend, which might open suddenly beneath us.  Towards the end of the month I had our store of seal meat and blubber brought aboard.  The depth as recorded by a sounding on the last day of March was 256 fathoms.  The continuous shoaling from 606 fathoms in a drift of 39 miles N. 26° W. in thirty days was interesting.  The sea shoaled as we went north, either to east or to west, and the fact suggested that the contour-lines ran east and west, roughly.  Our total drift between January 19, when the ship was frozen in, and March 31, a period of seventy-one days, had been 95 miles in a N. 80° W. direction.  The icebergs around us had not changed their relative positions.