advantage of the northerly breeze, but it had to come in again five
hours later when the wind hauled round to the west. The noon position
was lat. 60° 26´ S., long. 17° 58´ W., and the run for the twenty-four
hours had been only 33 miles. The ice was still badly congested, and
we were pushing through narrow leads and occasional openings with the
floes often close abeam on either side. Antarctic, snow and stormy
petrels, fulmars, white-rumped terns, and adelies were around us. The
quaint little penguins found the ship a cause of much apparent
excitement and provided a lot of amusement aboard. One of the standing
jokes was that all the adelies on the floe seemed to know Clark, and
when he was at the wheel rushed along as fast as their legs could carry
them, yelling out "Clark! Clark!" and apparently very indignant and
perturbed that he never waited for them or even answered them.

We found several good leads to the south in the evening, and continued
to work southward throughout the night and the following day. The pack
extended in all directions as far as the eye could reach. The noon
observation showed the run for the twenty-four hours to be 54 miles, a
satisfactory result under the conditions. Wild shot a young Ross seal
on the floe, and we manoeuvred the ship alongside. Hudson jumped down,
bent a line on to the seal, and the pair of them were hauled up. The
seal was 4 ft. 9 in. long and weighed about ninety pounds. He was a
young male and proved very good eating, but when dressed and minus the
blubber made little more than a square meal for our twenty-eight men,
with a few scraps for our breakfast and tea. The stomach contained
only amphipods about an inch long, allied to those found in the whales
at Grytviken.

The conditions became harder on December 14. There was a misty haze,
and occasional falls of snow. A few bergs were in sight. The pack was