Page:Scott's Last Expedition, Volume 2.djvu/222

and Dickason, and thus each has one day on in three. The duties of the cooks are to turn out at 7 and cook and serve out the breakfast, the others remaining in their bags for the meal. Then we all have a siesta till 10.30, when we turn out for the day's work. The cook starts the blubber stove and melts blubber for the lamps. The messman takes an ice-axe and chips frozen seal meat in the passage by the light of a blubber lamp. A cold job this and trying to the temper, as scraps of meat fly in all directions and have to be carefully collected afterwards. The remainder carry up the meat and blubber or look for seals. By 5 p.m. all except the cooks are in their bags, and we have supper. After supper the cooks melt ice for the morning, prepare breakfast, and clear up. Our rations at this time were as follows:—Breakfast, 1 mug of penguin and seal hoosh and 1 biscuit. Supper 1½ mugs of seal, 1 biscuit and ¾ pint of thin cocoa, tea, or hot water. We were always hungry on this, and to swell the hoosh we used occasionally to try putting in seaweed, but most of it had deteriorated owing to the heat of the sun and the attentions of the penguins.

The cocoa we could only afford to have five days a week and then very thin, but as we had a little tea we had weak tea on Sunday and reboiled the leaves for Monday. As already stated we had a little chocolate (2 ounces per man a week), and 8 lumps of sugar every Sunday. Our tobacco soon ran out, even with the most rigid economy, and we were reduced to smoking the much-boiled tea and wood shavings—a poor substitute. About the middle of this month we found we were getting through