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Owing to the drift we were actually eleven miles farther north than we had been on December 25. But we made fairly good progress on the 30th in fine, clear weather. The ship followed a long lead to the south-east during the afternoon and evening, and at 11 p.m. we crossed the Antarctic Circle.
The group is composed of two islands, one the above-named, the other Soledad or East Falkland. Captain Len Guy gave twelve hours’ leave to the whole crew. The next day the proceedings were to begin by a careful and minute inspection of the vessel’s hull and keel, in view of the contemplated prolonged navigation of the Antarctic seas.
The solid had wrested from the liquid thirty-seven million six hundred and fifty-seven square miles, equal to twelve billions nine hundred and sixty millions of acres. The shape of continents allows us to divide the waters into five great portions: the Arctic or Frozen Ocean, the Antarctic, or Frozen Ocean, the Indian, the Atlantic, and the Pacific Oceans.
We were bound round Cape Horn, and Captain Carr intended to try his fortune on the borders of the Antarctic ice-fields, in the neighbourhood of New Zealand and the coast of Japan, among the East India Islands; and those wide-spreading groups, among which are found the Friendly Islands, the Navigators, the Feejees, the New Hebrides, the Loyalty Islands, and New Caledonia, and known under the general name of Polynesia.
It was black, a cindery black, as though it had been vomited from the earth under the action of Plutonian forces; it suggested that some appalling and irresistible cataclysm had overturned the whole of its surface. Not one of the animals mentioned in the narrative was to be seen, and even the penguins which abound in the Antarctic regions had fled from this uninhabitable land.
On January 1, 1841, he passed the antarctic circle in 178 degrees east longitude. On the 11th he discovered land in 70 degrees 41' south latitude, 172 degrees 36' east longitude. He found that the land was a continuous coast, trending southward, and rising to peaks of ten thousand feet in height, all covered with ice and snow. On the 12th he landed and took possession in the name of the Queen.
This is a wonderful case, and probably indicates dispersal from an Antarctic centre during a former warm period.
While I was arriving at this conclusion as the result of my investigations, I recollected a verse of our poet Dante, which may be found in the first chapter of his Purgatory, where he imagines he is leaving this hemisphere to repair to the other, and, attempting to describe the antarctic pole, says: "I turned to the right hand and fixed my mind On the other pole, and saw four stars Not seen before, since the time of our first parents: Joyous appeared the heavens for their glory.
"Ah, we are well away from that fellow!" said Mr Meldrum rubbing his hands; but his congratulations were cut short in a moment by the look- out man forward the Norwegian sailor, who as an old whaler was accustomed to Antarctic sights and sounds shouting out that there was field-ice ahead, and that from the crashing of the floes he thought the ship must be near the pack.
Now there is a great antarctic drift-current, which flows round the Cape of Good Hope and divides there, one half flowing past the east coast of Africa and the other setting across the Indian Ocean.
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