Isolation Camp Log, Day 964

Somewhere above the 45th parallel

Since the shore party abandoned our derelict HMS Defender seven weeks ago, optimism has been high,. I think the men are glad to be on terra firma, and have approached their daily tasks with renewed vigor and, I dare say, a barely disguised enthusiasm. The first order of business, of course, was to dig a number of graves for those who didn’t survive the preceding cold months. We’d kept the remains in our cold storage bunker, and I had my concerns about the difficulty of extracting them from the ice. In the end I needn’t have worried. The unusually balmy late winter took care of the hard work, albeit with no small measure of pungency, and I asked my steward, Perkins, to reposition my tent upwind of the proceedings before the work commenced.