The short travelling season in the far north is limited on the one hand by the lingering cold of winter, and on the other by the summer thaw of the surface snow and the renewed motion of the ice. As soon, therefore, as travelling was at all possible, a dog sledge was got ready to carry despatches to our sister ship. Two energetic young officers and Niel Petersen the Dane were detailed for this duty. On the morning of 12th March everyone in the ship gathered on the floes to see them off. Their team of nine dogs carried the “Clements Markham” down the smooth ice of our exercise mile at a gallop, and in a few minutes the red and white sledge pennant with its crossed arrows was lost to sight amongst the hummocks off Cape Rawson. Three days passed in preparing the ship for spring, and the low temperature and strong wind made us think anxiously of our absent messmates, but we never for a moment supposed that they would suffer anything more than the recognised hardships of sledging in bad weather. On the evening of the third day, our heavy winter awning had just been taken down from over the deck, and the men were coming inboard after their day’s work, when some one caught sight of the dog sledge coming back to the ship. There were but two men running alongside, and they came on silently, without the usual joyful signalling that marks a returning party. Poor Petersen lay on the sledge, marvellously changed in three days, mottled with frost-bite, and apparently dying. His companions had succeeded in carrying him back to the ship only just in time. They themselves were much fatigued, and their fingers raw with frost-bites incurred in attempts to restore Petersen’s frozen limbs. When they had slept, as only tired men can, we heard their story.