The forecastle was visited after dinner and each man given a half-pound tin of tobacco. Boxing Day was comparatively fine, and a laundry was organised on shore with great success; a fire was made, old kerosene tins turned into boilers, and the articles washed in camp-baths with water from a streamlet. It is one thing, however, to wet clothes in the Patagonian Channels; it is quite another to dry them. For days afterwards the rain descended in torrents, while the wind blew persistently from the north-west; with one short intermission we lay in Hale Cove weather-bound for thirteen days, till, as some one remarked, “it was a pity that we had not given it as a postal address.” It was tiresome of course, but an interval of rest for all on board after the strenuous passage of the channels was not without advantage; for ourselves journals were written up, flowers pressed, and photographs developed. Hale Cove was fortunately one of those few ports in which it was possible to get a little exercise, which the denseness of the undergrowth generally rendered impossible. The cliffs, at the foot of which _Mana_ lay, were precipitous and clothed with vegetation to the sky-line, they thus scarcely lent themselves to exploration. There was, however, across the small bay a southern spur, on the top of which for some reason trees had not flourished and which was comparatively clear; this it was possible to reach by landing on a little beach and scrambling along an old track which had been cut through an intermediate belt of wood. We could in this way get some sort of a walk, at the cost of course of becoming soaked through from bogs and dripping vegetation.