This process was much accelerated by reason that
the leather washers about the stoppers had perished in the great
cold. Dr. Atkinson gives two striking examples of this.
1. Eight one-gallon tins in a wooden case, intended for a depot at
Cape Crozier, had been put out in September 1911. They were snowed up;
and when examined in December 1912 showed three tins full, three empty,
one a third full, and one two-thirds full.
2. When the search party reached One Ton Camp in November 1912 they
found that some of the food, stacked in a canvas 'tank' at the foot
of the cairn, was quite oily from the spontaneous leakage of the tins
seven feet above it on the top of the cairn.
The tins at the depots awaiting the Southern Party had of course been
opened and the due amount to be taken measured out by the supporting
parties on their way back. However carefully re-stoppered, they
were still liable to the unexpected evaporation and leakage already
described. Hence, without any manner of doubt, the shortage which
struck the Southern Party so hard.
_Note_ 27, _p_. 409.--The Fatal Blizzard. Mr. Frank Wild, who led one
wing of Dr. Mawson's Expedition on the northern coast of the Antarctic
continent, Queen Mary's Land, many miles to the west of the Ross Sea,
writes that 'from March 21 for a period of nine days we were kept in
camp by the same blizzard which proved fatal to Scott and his gallant
companions' (Times, June 2, 1913).
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