possible to write: "A fortnight out to-day, and from the general
appearance of the wardroom we might have been out a year."

We were to a great extent strangers to one another when we left England,
but officers and crew settled down to their jobs quickly, and when men
live as close as we did they settle down or quarrel before very long. Let
us walk into the cabins which surround the small wardroom aft. The first
on the left is that of Scott and Lieutenant Evans, but Scott is not on
board, and Wilson has taken his place. In the next cabin to them is
Drake, the secretary. On the starboard side of the screw are Oates,
Atkinson and Levick, the two latter being doctors, and on the port side
Campbell and Pennell, who is navigator. Then Rennick and Bowers, the
latter just home from the Persian Gulf--both of these are watchkeepers.
In the next cabin are Simpson, meteorologist, back from Simla, with
Nelson and Lillie, marine biologists. In the last cabin, the Nursery, are
the youngest, and necessarily the best behaved, of this community,
Wright, the physicist and chemist, Gran the Norwegian ski-expert, and
myself, Wilson's helper and assistant zoologist. It is difficult to put a
man down as performing any special job where each did so many, but that
is roughly what we were.

Certain men already began to stand out. Wilson, with an apparently
inexhaustible stock of knowledge on little things and big; always ready
to give help, and always ready with sympathy and insight, a tremendous
worker, and as unselfish as possible; a universal adviser. Pennell, as
happy as the day was long, working out sights, taking his watch on the
bridge, or if not on watch full of energy aloft, trimming coal, or any
other job that came along; withal spending hours a day on magnetic work,
which he did as a hobby, and not in any way as his job. Bowers was
proving himself the best seaman on board, with an exact knowledge of the