The weather was still thick on the following morning, and the party, making a start after breakfast, missed its way.

"We shaped a course where I imagined Hut Point to be," wrote Captain Mackintosh in his diary, "but when the sledge-meter showed thirteen miles fifty yards, which is four miles in excess of the distance from the slip to Hut Point, I decided to halt again.

The surface was changing considerably and the land was still obscured.

We have been travelling over a thick snow surface, in which we sink deeply, and the dogs are not too cheerful about it." They started again at noon on January 27, when the weather had cleared sufficiently to reveal the land, and reached Hut Point at 4 p.m.

The sledge-meter showed that the total distance travelled had been over seventeen miles.