Next day broke cold and still with the same wet snow, and in the clearing light I could see that with the present loose surface, and considering how little result we had to show for all our strenuous efforts of the past four days, it would be impossible to proceed for any great distance.  Taking into account also the possibility of leads opening close to us, and so of our being able to row north-west to where we might find land, I decided to find a more solid floe and there camp until conditions were more favourable for us to make a second attempt to escape from our icy prison.  To this end we moved our tents and all our gear to a thick, heavy old floe about one and a half miles from the wreck and there made our camp.  We called this “Ocean Camp.”  It was with the utmost difficulty that we shifted our two boats.  The surface was terrible—­like nothing that any of us had ever seen around us before.  We were sinking at times up to our hips, and everywhere the snow was two feet deep.

I decided to conserve our valuable sledging rations, which would be so necessary for the inevitable boat journey, as much as possible, and to subsist almost entirely on seals and penguins.

A party was sent back to Dump Camp, near the ship, to collect as much clothing, tobacco, etc., as they could find.  The heavy snow which had fallen in the last few days, combined with the thawing and consequent sinking of the surface, resulted in the total disappearance of a good many of the things left behind at this dump.  The remainder of the men made themselves as comfortable as possible under the circumstances at Ocean Camp.  This floating lump of ice, about a mile square at first but later splitting into smaller and smaller fragments, was to be our home for nearly two months.  During these two months we made frequent visits to the vicinity of the ship and retrieved much valuable clothing and food and some few articles of personal value which in our light-hearted optimism we had thought to leave miles behind us on our dash across the moving ice to safety.

The collection of food was now the all-important consideration.  As we were to subsist almost entirely on seals and penguins, which were to provide fuel as well as food, some form of blubber-stove was a necessity.  This was eventually very ingeniously contrived from the ship’s steel ash-shoot, as our first attempt with a large iron oil-drum did not prove eminently successful.  We could only cook seal or penguin hooshes or stews on this stove, and so uncertain was its action that the food was either burnt or only partially cooked; and, hungry though we were, half-raw seal meat was not very appetizing.  On one occasion a wonderful stew made from seal meat, with two or three tins of Irish stew that had been salved from the ship, fell into the fire through the bottom of the oil-drum that we used as a saucepan becoming burnt out on account of the sudden intense heat of the fire below.  We lunched that day on one biscuit and a quarter of a tin of bully-beef each, frozen hard.