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As for the usual Antarctic birds, petrels, pigeons, and cormorants, they passed in screaming flocks, and legions of penguins, ranged along the edges of the icefields, watched the evolutions of the schooner. These penguins are the real inhabitants of these dismal solitudes, and nature could not have created a type more suited to the desolation of the glacial zone.
Other beds may yet be found, but we saw that there was not a general upheaval, as there had been in the Permian, and it is quite possible that there were few or no ice-fields. We do not, in fact, know the causes of the Permian icefields.
It may be inferred that the Happy Return and the Perpetuana were the heaviest laden, for they fell behind the rest of the fleet on the way out, and were embayed, along with Outlaw's Success, in the icefields off Digges Island in July.
The message is for all; for the cleverest white man, the most ignorant savage; for the black man of Africa, the yellow man of China, the tawny little man who lives among the icefields of the Arctic Circle.
Warm beverages, such as coffee and tea, were regularly distributed to the sailors morning and evening; and as it was important to live on meat, they shot ducks and teal, which abounded in these parts. Jean Cornbutte also placed at the summit of the mainmast a "crow's nest," a sort of cask staved in at one end, in which a look-out remained constantly, to observe the icefields.
By eight o'clock on Sunday morning we had met great blocks of ice, and grown accustomed to hearing them bump against the side of the boat; and before noon we were well into the icefields, with loose blocks of ice on every side, and a rough surface of piled-up masses as far as the eye could see. Up a narrow strip of blue water we steamed, the passage closing in our wake.
The great family of mosses is found not only near home, but even far away amid the icefields and the snow, where the reindeer searches with its horns for the white moss which is its food, and where Sir John Franklin and his devoted men gathered the black Tripe de Roche upon which they tried to live during those dark months when their ship lay fast wedged between
This disaffected man, though ignorant of navigation, insisted upon steering to the south, believing that we had run to the northward of the Friendly Islands, and was for running the ship ashore and beseeching the protection of the natives. Lesly in vain protested that a southward course would bring us into icefields.
He firmly believed from his observations of the icefields that such a continent in the far south did exist, but he asserted that further exploration in that direction would be of little service to navigation, and would be hardly worth the cost and danger that must be incurred.
I have heard that the reason why the soles of its feet are so hairy is because in its northern home it is constantly travelling over icefields, sometimes climbing the lofty bergs and the long hair prevents it from slipping. If so, this is but one more instance showing how perfectly the animals are fitted for the life which they live in their natural state.
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