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nature of its materials, present some very remarkable appearances. The eastern side is entirely faced with cliffs of ice, about 300 feet in height, which the constant washing of the sea forms into singularly fantastic shapes. Similar cliffs are also found on the South and S.W. sides, and their base is bounded by a beach of ashes and lava, which extend round the whole island at low water. The examination of the basin was attended with considerable difficulty, arising from the small ashes and dust which were carried into it from the island. Seals, and their companions, penguins and sea-leopards, were the only inhabitants found in this desolate island, which affords not the slightest verdure. Streams of water, at a temperature of 140° and 160° of Fahrenheit, were found issuing in some places from the sides of the hills, and running into the basin, the water of which was scarcely above the freezing point. It is generally supposed that this basin was formerly the crater of a volcano, and that the sea has found its way into it by washing out the narrow passage by which the Chanticleer entered. How long it has been resorted to by sealing-vessels is unknown."

BRIDGMAN'S ISLAND.-Near the centre of the Shetland group is Bridgman's Isle, in lat. 62° 4′, lon. 57° 0', apparently another volcanic production. Capt. Weddell, on passing within 200 yards of it, observed smoke issuing through the fissures of the rock, and apparently with much force. The figure of the island is nearly round; it is very small, but 400 feet in height, partaking of the form of a sugar-loaf.

On advancing from the northward toward Livingston's or the Main Island, the land will appear in mountains of a vast height, and covered entirely with snow; the base of them terminating in perpendicular ice-cliffs. The whole has an awfully grand, though terrific and desolate, appearance; the snowy mountains showing themselves, one over another, far above the clouds, and exciting in the mind a devotional reverence on the wonders of the Almighty and even if surrounded on all sides with rocks and breakers, the mind is forced into pious contemplation of the grandeur of the scene.

On this side of the group, in lat. 62° 20′, and lon. 59° 45', is a small isle, named Table Island, which is by far the most remarkable hereabout, and will always be an infallible mark for any one approaching, as it is not possible to mistake it for any other land. All strangers, therefore, should make this their land-fall, particularly in the early part of the season, for then the land is not so easily made out, it having a great quantity of snow upon it, which may, at times, deceive those best acquainted. Its top appears as level as a bowling-green, and its sides resemble a wall. In the upper part of the N.E. end of it is a chink, or division, which from some situations may be seen.

LOUIS PHILIPPE LAND, JOINVILLE LAND, ETC.-To the southward of the South Shetland group is the land discovered by the late Admiral D'Urville, of the French marine, and named by him as above. From a letter, addressed by him to the French minister, contained in the Bulletin de la Société de Geographie de Paris, 1838, p. 275, we copy the following notice of his exploration :

A more lengthened account of this exploration is given in the Narrative of the Voyage subsequently published.

PETER I. ISLAND-ALEXANDER I. ISLAND.

663

*

"On the 27th of February, 1838, after a long stretch towards the South, through much ice, we came upon these mysterious lands; and in spite of the complicated obstacles against which we had to contend, both on account of the continued bad weather, and from the fog and ice, in the space of about 8 days we succeeded in tracing exactly their outline, for a distance of about 120 miles, between 63° and 64° South latitude. The land, which is crowned with immense peaks, is covered by continual snows, of unknown depth. Were it not for the blackish rocks, rendered visible by the melting of the snows which form their limits on the coast, one would often be scarcely able to distinguish them from the numerous fields of ice which surround them. The principal of these places has received the name of Louis Philippe Land, in honour of the king, who first conceived the idea of making these explorations towards the South Pole. Other islands have received the names of various persons who have exhibited an active interest in our expedition, more especially of that illustrious statesman who arranged the plan of our voyage. Lastly, the mountains, capes, and islands, will recall the memory of the officers who took part in our dangers."

PETER I. ISLAND.

The Island of the Emperor Peter I. was discovered by Capt. Bellingshausen in Jan. 1821. From the description he has given in his journal it is 8 leagues in circumference. He determined its lat. to be in 68° 57' S., and lon. 90° 46′ W. The height of the island is more than 4,000 feet; and the variation of the compass, at the time of its discovery, was ascertained to be 36° 6' easterly. Capt. Bellingshausen's voyage was made in the Russian Imperial ships, Mirny and Vostok; and the account of it, still in the untranslated Russian language, was published in the year 1819: we can therefore give no further account of this point, or of the next,

ALEXANDER I. LAND,

which was also discovered some days after the previous island, by Capt. Bellingshausen. He determined the North point of this island to be in lat. 68° 51′ S., and lon. 73° 9′ 46". The ships were prevented by the ice from approaching its southern point, and thus its position could not be determined.

These two detached portions of land may be presumed to form portions of the great southern continent; although the continuity has not been traced, yet certain indications lead to this. The southern part of Graham's Land, that is, the portion. of it seen by Capt. Biscoe in February, 1832, from Adelaide Island, is not above 100 miles distant from it, and this again forming a portion of the South Shetland range. The continent may be reasonably traced here through an extent of 250 leagues.

There is also reason to believe that the Islands of Peter I. and Alexander I. are connected by some hitherto undiscovered land; for Capt. Bellingshausen, in his traverse from one to the other, met with several signs of land, as, for example, some birds, which from their formation seemed to be land-birds, and he even

* Mount D'Urville is 3,060 feet high.

perceived a change in the colour of the water. Now although the vacancies remain hitherto unfilled, the recent discoveries of Sir James Ross to the westward in such high latitudes lead to the inference that continuous land exists in those inaccessible regions. This inference has had greater weight since the discoveries recorded in the succeeding paragraphs.

ANTARCTIC LANDS.

On all the early maps of the world we find a terra australis incognita marked as surrounding the South Pole. This is one of the most ancient ideas of speculative geography, and its existence was supposed to be necessary to counterbalance the arctic lands. It was not until after the later voyages of Kerguelen, Cook, and others, that it entirely disappeared from our charts. The first of these navigators pushed to the southward, and discovered, in 1772, the island now bearing his name, with the idea of determining its existence. One of the great objects of the second voyage of our great navigator, Cook, was also the solution of the same problem, as explained in the introduction to the account of that voyage; and with this object Cook penetrated as far as lat. 71° 10′ S. on the meridian of 107° W., but without succeeding in his object. Some slight indications of the existence of land had been seen by him in lat. 61° 30′ S., lon. 95° E. The result of these explorations led to the obliteration of these supposed lands from our representations.

The revival of the ancient speculations in recent times is due to the enterprise of the eminent and spirited merchants, the Messrs. Enderby, of London. A vessel despatched for the southern whale fishery, the brig Tula, commanded by Capt. John Biscoe, discovered the coast, lying on the antarctic circle, to the South of Madagascar, and to which the name of the munificent proprietors was attached. This is, however, beyond our present limits, nor have we included the land described in the preceding article, South of Cape Horn, which, as before alluded to, is very probably a portion of a much larger extent of land, perhaps connected with that to be described presently.

Between these southern lands, that is, to the South of Australia, and on and to the South of the antarctic circle, is a range, or perhaps a range of coast, the merit of the discovery of which has been the subject of angry disputation. We will give a brief outline of the various points that have entered into this discussion.

In the year 1839, several merchants, at the head of whom were the Messrs. Enderby, had two vessels,—the Eliza Scott, under Capt. John Balleny, and the Sabrina cutter, under Capt. Freeman, in these seas. On February 9th in that year these two vessels discovered the range of islands called the Balleny Islands; and on March 2nd following, appearances of land were seen by them in lon. 117° E., and named Sabrina Land. This was the first discovery. The next was made nearly simultaneously. On Jan. 1st, 1840, two French vessels quitted Sydney to follow up the magnetic meridian to the southern magnetic pole. These were the corvettes L'Astrolabe and La Zelée, under the command of Dumont D'Urville. On January 19th M. Vincendon Dumoulin distinctly saw from the

* Relation de Deux Voyages, &c., par M. de Kerguelen, part i., 1782.

masthead of the Astrolabe land to the southward. They landed on some rocks on January 21st, taking possession in the name of France. This land was called Adelie Land (Terre Adelie), from Adèle, the wife of the commander. On January 13th following, the same vessels approached what was considered to be land, though defended by enormous fields of ice. This was named Clarie Coast (Côte Clarie).

The other claims at this period have obtained an unfortunate notoriety. They are those of the American Exploring Expedition. On Dec. 29th, 1839, that is, two days before the French expedition above-named sailed, four ships under the command of Lieut. (since Capt.) Wilkes, left Sydney on their antarctic cruise. Some land was marked on a chart that was stated to have been seen on Jan. 13th; but in the "Narrative,” vol. ii. p. 292, the first claim of discovery advanced is dated on Jan. 16th; but more of these presently. The first land incontestably made out by the American vessels was on their landing on it on Jan. 30th, Adelie Land, discovered by the French eleven days prior to this. The American ships struggled on to the westward, daily announcing appearances of land to the southward, but without anything more tangible, till Feb. 21st, when they bore away to the northward. A chart was drawn up from this cruise, in which Capt. Wilkes says he laid down the land "not only where we actually determined it to exist, but those places in which every appearance denoted its existence;" and a tracing of it was given to Capt. Sir James Ross, who was then on his antarctic expedition in 1840-41.

We have now entered on delicate ground, but justice to all demands that it should be traversed.

The well-known magnetic expedition in H.M.S. Erebus and Terror, the ships whose unknown fate among the northern ices is at this moment a topic of most intense interest, then under the command of Capt. Sir Jas. Clark Ross and Capt. Crozier, after making their brilliant discovery of the Victoria Land, and having the before-mentioned American chart on board, arrived at the very spot where the appearance of land was stated to have been first observed by the United States' Expedition, but it all melted into thin air, and after sailing over the space indicated, and sounding 600 fathoms without bottom on the top of the mountains marked by Capt. Wilkes, its non-existence was satisfactorily proved. This was on March 5-7, 1841, and 70 or 80 miles to the N.E. of the Balleny Islands.

This discovery naturally threw discredit on the other portions of the statements of Capt. Wilkes, and they were, with other matters, made the subject of a courtmartial held on board the U.S.S. North Carolina, on the return of the Exploring Expedition. Capt. Sir James Ross has published a fac-simile of Capt. Wilkes's first tracing in his work; and this chart, with the exception of that part disproved, has been also given in the "Narrative of the American Expedition," published three years later, that is, in 1845; and in which narrative these very singular claims of priority and extent of discovery are still repeated, which of course is long subsequent to the period when Capt. Wilkes must have learnt the particulars of Balleny's (not Bellamy's) and D'Urville's real claims.

"This confidence in reporting as real discoveries lands only suspected to exist (we quote M. Biot), has appeared to European navigators most surprising, and

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altogether presumptuous. Experience has taught them how fallacious these appearances are, and how little they are to be trusted, especially in the southern seas, and amid the polar ices. The most experienced navigators have taken these ideal lands for realities, and have drawn their outlines, and watched their details, for entire days, after which they have vanished." Sir James Ross gives a curious example of this—“ On Jan. 5, 1841, in lat. 66° 55', amid the ice, a remarkable appearance of land, which remained for several hours without the slightest change of feature, which many of the officers took to be real land, ranges of hills covered with snow. Yet this, and many other such, was but the appearance of the upper edge of the clouds, which, with a perfectly defined but irregular outline, shows the elevation to which aqueous vapour can ascend in these latitudes. Below this edge the vapour appears in all stages of condensation; above it, the cold and clear atmosphere, into which it cannot rise."* With such facts as these, can it be reasonably doubted, but that many of the appearances of land, very indistinctly seen by the United States' Expedition, may not have been equally fallacious? We have, in the succeeding pages, given Capt. Wilkes's account of the land, or what was presumed to be land, seen from the ships under his command. On the question of the actual existence of all these various portions of land, we cannot give any opinion. We would merely draw attention to the foregoing fact, that the only portion since examined has been found not to exist.

Now, for the question of priority, Capt. Wilkes lays claim not only to having been the first to discover, but the first to suspect the existence of the great southern continent. This is putting out of sight all the old authors, and the explicit object of the voyages of Tasman, Kerguelen, Cook, and others. Complaint is made that other nations, "with what intent I shall not stop to inquire, have seemed disposed to rob us of the honour by underrating the importance of their own researches." This is remarkable. Moreover, this sentence was first published four years after the question was set at rest. The grand discovery of Sir James Ross, in the succeeding year, does not need to be underrated. Nor can the discovery of Capt. Balleny, in the year previous, be argued away. One other remark relative to the real claims of D'Urville and Wilkes. Capt. Wilkes's first chart would date the first sight of the apparent (but not real) land on Jan. 12th or 13th, 1840. In his " Narrative" he claims from Jan. 16th, but at the court-martial some of his own officers averred that the supposed land in question was not certainly seen until Jan. 19th, or three days later. Now, it certainly appears very singular that this should be the identical day on which D'Urville saw the real land of Adelie to the westward, a fact not actually established by Wilkes till afterwards, on the same spot, which he subsequently persists in calling Piner's Bay; but this was on Jan. 30th, or eleven days later than D'Urville's. These trifling differences would not have been considered of importance as to rival claims, had they not most unfortunately been magnified into objects of real consideration by the course afterwards pursued.

The order of discovery, then, is summed up in few words. First, Capt. Balleny discovered the islands bearing his name, February 9th, 1839, and the

* Voyage to the South Pole, vol. i. p. 177.

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