Volume 2 — Chapter VI (continued 2)

“We have now the advantage of finding drinking-water everywhere. We are also eating our old provender again; but, curiously enough, neither Johansen nor I think the farinaceous food as good as one might suppose after a month of meat diet. It is good to be under way again, and not the least pleasant part about it is our lighter sledges; but then we certainly left a good deal behind at ‘Longing Camp.’ In addition to a respectable mound of meat and blubber, we left three fine bearskins. Our friend, the bag, too, is lying on the top of the bears; a quantity of wood, consisting of the boards from under the sledges, the snow-shoes and other things, more than half of Blessing’s fine medicaments—plaster-of-Paris bandages, soft steam-sterilized gauze bandages, hygroscopic cotton wadding—to say nothing of a good aluminium horizon-glass, rope, our combined frying-pan and melter, half an aluminium cap belonging to the cooker, sheets of German silver, a train-oil lamp of the same, bags, tools, sail-cloth, Finn shoes, our wolfskin fingerless gloves, also woollen ones, a geological hammer, half a shirt, socks, and other sundries, all strewn about in chaotic confusion. Instead of all these we have an augmentation in the form of a sack of dried seal’s and bear’s flesh and the other half of the aluminium cap full of blubber. We are now thoroughly divested of all superfluous articles, and there is hardly so much as a bit of wood to be had if one should want a stick to slip through the end of the hauling-rope.”