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"You know how Franklin began, my friends; he was a cabin-boy like Cook and Nelson; after having employed his youth in great maritime expeditions, he resolved in 1845 to launch out in search of the North-West passage; he commanded the Erebus and the Terror, two vessels, already famous, that had just made an Antarctic campaign under James Ross, in 1840.
Often seeing no exit, I thought we were definitely prisoners; but, instinct guiding him at the slightest indication, Captain Nemo would discover a new pass. He was never mistaken when he saw the thin threads of bluish water trickling along the ice-fields; and I had no doubt that he had already ventured into the midst of these Antarctic seas before.
He hit one on the Antarctic continent; according to his account, everything there was fairly new. He didn't mess things up too badly, and it ought to be still operating. We'll go in from the south pole, and we'll have to go in fast." They shifted personnel and equipment.
They had but recently returned from the Antarctic seas, where Captain Sir James Ross, in a voyage towards the South Pole, had attained the highest southern latitude yet reached. Both were fine square-rigged ships, strengthened in every way that the shipwrights of the time could devise.
Their appearance was sufficiently hideous to alarm the most callous venturer into the Antarctic. "We've got to make the aeroplane," exclaimed Frank, "come on, get your guns out and fire when I give the word. If we can only kill a few of them perhaps the rest will take fright."
It was now absolutely necessary to lose most of the hours of darkness it being much too dangerous to run in the night. The great barrier of ice was known to be close at hand; and Cook's "Ne Plus Ultra," at that time the great boundary of antarctic navigation, was near the parallel of latitude to which the schooner had reached.
Where is the scientist who can yet tell us in what country the common Chimney Swift passes the winter, or over what stretches of sea and land the Arctic Tern passes when journeying between its summer home in the Arctic seas and its winter abode in the Antarctic wastes?
My own experience will be found to testify most directly to the falsity of the conclusion arrived at by the society. These are the principal attempts which have been made at penetrating to a high southern latitude, and it will now be seen that there remained, previous to the voyage of the Jane, nearly three hundred degrees of longitude in which the Antarctic circle had not been crossed at all.
There ain't no folks there. Cap'n Am'zon says there ain't 'nough land at the south pole to make Marm Scudder's garden and they say she didn't need more'n what her patchwork quilt would cover. Where there's land there's folks. And if there was land in the Antarctic there'd be Eskimos like there is up North. "'Hem! Well, that wasn't what I begun on, was it? This knitting.
Where it is too cold for surface animal life, as in the Antarctic Ocean, these dead diatoms form the mud on the bottom of the ocean, and in the extremely deep parts, the sea-bed is red clay, but most of it is an 'ooze' 'Globigerina, as it is called made up of the shells of those very creatures you have now been seeing on that microscope slide.
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