Our meat supply was now very low indeed; we were reduced to just a few scraps.  Fortunately, however, we caught two seals and four emperor penguins, and next day forty adelies.  We had now only forty days’ food left, and the lack of blubber was being keenly felt.  All our suet was used up, so we used seal-blubber to fry the meat in.  Once we were used to its fishy taste we enjoyed it; in fact, like Oliver Twist, we wanted more.

On Leap Year day, February 29, we held a special celebration, more to cheer the men up than for anything else.  Some of the cynics of the party held that it was to celebrate their escape from woman’s wiles for another four years.  The last of our cocoa was used to-day.  Henceforth water, with an occasional drink of weak milk, is to be our only beverage.  Three lumps of sugar were now issued to each man daily.

One night one of the dogs broke loose and played havoc with our precious stock of bannocks.  He ate four and half of a fifth before he could be stopped.  The remaining half, with the marks of the dog’s teeth on it, I gave to Worsley, who divided it up amongst his seven tent-mates; they each received about half a square inch.

Lees, who was in charge of the food and responsible for its safe keeping, wrote in his diary:  “The shorter the provisions the more there is to do in the commissariat department, contriving to eke out our slender stores as the weeks pass by.  No housewife ever had more to do than we have in making a little go a long way.

“Writing about the bannock that Peter bit makes one wish now that one could have many a meal that one has given to the dog at home.  When one is hungry, fastidiousness goes to the winds and one is only too glad to eat up any scraps regardless of their antecedents.  One is almost ashamed to write of all the titbits one has picked up here, but it is enough to say that when the cook upset some pemmican on to an old sooty cloth and threw it outside his galley, one man subsequently made a point of acquiring it and scraping off the palatable but dirty compound.”

Another man searched for over an hour in the snow where he had dropped a piece of cheese some days before, in the hopes of finding a few crumbs.  He was rewarded by coming across a piece as big as his thumb-nail, and considered it well worth the trouble.

By this time blubber was a regular article of our diet—­either raw, boiled, or fried.  “It is remarkable how our appetites have changed in this respect.  Until quite recently almost the thought of it was nauseating.  Now, however, we positively demand it.  The thick black oil which is rendered down from it, rather like train-oil in appearance and cod-liver oil in taste, we drink with avidity.”

We had now about enough farinaceous food for two meals all round, and sufficient seal to last for a month.  Our forty days’ reserve sledging rations, packed on the sledges, we wished to keep till the last.