Wild, Harrison and Hoadley went to examine the shelf-ice with a view to its suitability for a wintering station. The cliff was eighty to one hundred feet in height, so that the ice in total thickness must have attained at least as much as six hundred feet. Assisted by snow-ramps slanting down on to the floe, the ascent with ice-axes and alpine rope was fairly easy. Two hundred yards from the brink, the shelf-ice was thrown into pressure-undulations and fissured by crevasses, but beyond that was apparently sound and unbroken. About seventeen miles to the south the rising slopes of ice-mantled land were visible, fading away to the far east and west. The ice-shelf was proved later on to extend for two hundred miles from east to west, ostensibly fusing with the Termination Ice-Tongue, whose extremity is one hundred and eighty miles to the north. The whole has been called the Shackleton Ice-Shelf. Wild and his party unanimously agreed to seize upon this last opportunity, and to winter on the floating ice. The work of discharging stores was at once commenced. To raise the packages from the floe to the top of the ice-shelf, a "flying-fox" was rigged. "A kedge-anchor was buried in the sea-ice, and from this a two-and-a-half-inch wire-hawser was led upwards over a pair of sheer-legs on top of the cliff to another anchor buried some distance back. The whole was set taut by a tackle. The stores were then slung to a travelling pulley on the wire, and hauled on to the glacier by means of a rope led through a second pulley on the sheer-legs. The ship's company broke stores out of the hold and sledged them three hundred yards to the foot of an aerial, where they were hooked on to the travelling-block by which the shore party, under Wild, raised them to their destination." "It was most important to accelerate the landing as much as possible, not only on account of the lateness of the season--the 'Gauss' had been frozen in on February 22 at a spot only one hundred and seventy miles away--but because the floe was gradually breaking up and floating away. When the last load was hoisted, the water was lapping within ten yards of the 'flying-fox'". A fresh west-north-west wind on February 17 caused some trouble. Captain Davis writes: "February 19. The floe to which we have been attached is covered by a foot of water. The ship has been bumping a good deal to-day. Notwithstanding the keen wind and driving snow, every one has worked well. Twelve tons of coal were the last item to go up the cliff." In all, thirty-six tons of stores were raised on to the shelf-ice, one hundred feet above sea-level, in four days. "February 20. The weather is very fine and quite a contrast to yesterday. We did not get the coal ashore a moment too soon, as this morning the ice marked by our sledge tracks went to sea in a north-westerly direction, and this afternoon it is drifting back as if under the influence of a tide or current. We sail at 7 A.M. to-morrow.