Orde-Lees' Journal - November 10, 1915
Temperature +20.
Again a very fine warm dry day, but the night was rather cold with a minimum temperature of -1 but though cold we are not uncomfortably cold in our tents.
The tents are made of a pale green lawn as thin as cambric but it is a perfect protection against the weather. Even in a blizzard there is no more than a slight draft penetrating the walls of the tent. The design of the two pole-tents is rectangular, the larger one which holds 8 men being 13 ft. by 6 ft. 6 in. with vertical sides 2 ft. 6 ins. high sloping up to a pyramidal point just over 9 ft. high into which fits a single bamboo pole. It is rather an unusual shape, very handy but rather a tight fit for eight of us each in a fat reindeer sleeping bag. This tent was destined to be used as a sort of permanent depot tent, say twenty or thirty miles away from our hut had we landed. It is a strange turn of fate that it has come to be used as it is now is, but it is fortunate that we have just enough tents to accommodate us all here, if some of them are rather tightly packed.
The other pole tent is of similar design but of stronger material and is perfectly square having an 8 ft. side and having only four occupants is fairly roomy.
Besides the two pole tents there are three of the ingenious new hoop tents of Sir Ernest's and Marston's design.
Two of them accommodate four men each and the other just holds eight men, and for this reason & because of my incurable habit of snoring there is a movement on foot to eject me from the 8-man pole tent & make me sleep in the rabbit hutch.
The construction of the hoop tents is entirely novel. They require only one guy [wire] to keep them fixed. In appearance they are not unlike a gigantic beetle, the frame work consists entirely of large light steel hoops jointed at their lower extremities like the ribs of a motor car hood, from which indeed the idea has been derived.
In the two smaller tents all the four hoops are fixed to the same hinge, but in the 8 man hoop tent there are two separate sets of hoops and therefore an intervening space in the middle as it were without a support. Considerable care has to be taken in pitching this large tent as it is inclined to be a bit wobbly if not properly done but in practice and with practice it is found to be rigid enough.
This pattern of tent has the enormous advantage that it can be pitched in half a minute in the worst blizzard which quite outweighs its slight disadvantage on the score of weight and a certain amount of unwieldiness on the march, both of which drawbacks could no doubt be easily overcome by careful experimentation.
As in the rectangular tents the entrance consists of a round hole into which a bottomless sack or tube of canvas is sewn, there being just sufficient space between the lowest rib & the ground to introduce this the most efficient of all doorways for polar work.
All the tents have round their base a flat skirt about 18 inches wide, which is spread out on and covered with snow in order to anchor the tent and keep the junction between it and the "ground" weather-tight.
Hunting parties on this morning procured four seals and one baby seal today; so we have enough of meat & blubber to last us for a long time including dogs and the kitchen fire.
A terrible catastrophe occurred today - serious only by reason of our straitened circum-stances. We had just made up an especially good hoosh of twenty one-pound tins of tinned Irish stew and it had not been in the pot many minutes before there was a splash and a cloud of steam; the bottom of the pot had fallen out and the precious contents extinguished the fire & combined with the blubbery fuel to form a mournful rancid mass. In lieu we rapidly substituted tinned corned beef frozen as hard as a brick.
Breakfast - Haddock kedgeree, 11 lbs. tinned haddock, 4 lbs. rice, coffee & milk.
Luncheon - Bannocks (2 each), tin potted meat & 1 tin corned beef 4 men, (tea, milk & sugar).
Supper - Seal hoosh, cocoa, milk & sugar.
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