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Updated: June 13, 2025
We push through pack-ice, and through floes and fields, by lofty bergs, by an island or two covered with penguins, until there lies before us a long range of mountains, nine or ten thousand feet in height, and all clad in eternal snow. That is a portion of the Southern Continent.
After several changes of course, which it would take too long to relate, they reached the Orange Islands at the northern extremity of Nova Zembla. They began to descend the eastern coast, but were soon obliged to enter a harbour, where they found themselves completely blocked in by the pack-ice, and in which "they were forced in great cold, poverty, misery, and grief, to stay all the winter."
The noon latitude had been 57° 26´ S., and I had not expected to find pack-ice nearly so far north, though the whalers had reported pack-ice right up to South Thule. The situation became dangerous that night. We pushed into the pack in the hope of reaching open water beyond, and found ourselves after dark in a pool which was growing smaller and smaller.
No four-footed animals rove over it; no human beings inhabit it. Hundreds of thousands of square miles of pack-ice, glaciers, and ice-walls jealously guard it on all sides. On one side, for a distance of five hundred miles, extends a great ice barrier whose perpendicular ice-wall is from thirty to three hundred feet in height.
Generally drift-ice is within reach of the swell, and is a stage in the breaking down of pack-ice, the size of the floes being much smaller than in the latter. The Antarctic or Arctic pack usually has a girdle or fringe of drift-ice. "Brash". Small fragments and roundish nodules; the wreck of other kinds of ice.
Still, these winds from the south and south-west, though invariably accompanied by snow and low temperatures, were welcome in that they drove the pack-ice away from the immediate vicinity of the island, and so gave rise on each occasion to hopes of relief.
In addition to the floe and the pack-ice, the gale and the currents were bringing down true bergs, sailing mountains of ice, snapped off from the Greenland side of the water or the north shore of Melville Bay. They pounded in solemnly, the waves breaking white round them, and advanced on the floe like an old-time fleet under full sail.
February 20 saw the Discovery speeding along a stretch of coast that had been quite unknown until she had two years previously made her way south along it, and at that time she had been obliged to keep a long distance out on account of the pack-ice.
We were forced away from the barrier once for three hours by a line of very heavy pack-ice. Otherwise there was open water along the edge, with high loose pack to the west and north-west. We noticed a seal bobbing up and down in an apparent effort to swallow a long silvery fish that projected at least eighteen inches from its mouth.
Next day they sighted Alexander Land, but could not approach nearer to it than twenty miles on account of impenetrable pack-ice. On February 28 they had reached lat. 70° 20' S. and long. 85° W. Then a breeze from the north sprang up and opened large channels in the ice, leading southward. They turned to the south, and plunged at haphazard into the Antarctic floes.
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