CHAPTER IX


PRELIMINARY EXPLORATIONS


So much for the winter life up to date; no great excitements, nothing
untoward, but a remarkable bonhomie obtaining in our little company
despite the tedium of so many days of winter gloom. On June 27 Dr. Wilson
with Bowers and Cherry-Garrard started on a remarkable journey to Cape
Crozier, nearly seventy miles distant from Cape Evans, via Hut Point and
the Barrier. The object of these intrepid souls was to observe the
incubation of the Emperor Penguins at their rookery, which was known to
exist near the junction point of the Barrier Edge with the rocky cliff
south of Cape Crozier. It must be borne in mind that this was the first
Antarctic midwinter journey, and that the three men must of necessity
face abnormally low temperature's and unheard of hardships whilst making
the sledge journey over the icy Barrier. We had gathered enough knowledge
on the autumn sledge journeys and in the days of the Discovery expedition
to tell us this, so that it was not without considerable misgivings that
Captain Scott permitted Wilson to carry the winter expedition to Cape
Crozier into being. The scope of my little volume only permits me to tell
this story in brief. No very detailed account has yet been published,
although Cherry-Garrard, the only survivor of the three, wrote the far
too modest memoir of the journey which has been published in Volume II of
"Scott's Last Expedition."

Apart from the zoological knowledge Wilson hoped to gain from the Cape