Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 1.djvu/264

178 land in this position. This appearance of land was, however, nothing more than the upper part of a cloud, marking, by a well-defined but irregular line, the limit to which vapour can ascend in these latitudes; below is vapour in every degree of condensation, above, the clear cold space which vapour can never attain. It is always near the margin of the ice that these appearances of land are most remarkable and most deceptive. It proved a useful lesson to some of our new hands, who could not be persuaded it was not land until we had actually passed over the place of their baseless mountains.

We saw many seals, as we sailed along, basking on the ice, and several penguins; these curious birds actually followed our ships, answering the call of the sailors, who imitated their cry; and although they could not scramble over the ice so fast as our ships sailed past it, they made up for it when they got into the water, and we soon had quite a flock of them in our wake, playing about our vessel like so many porpoises.

The elegant white petrel was also very numerous, and a single stormy petrel, of a different and larger species than our European procellaria pelagica, was seen.

The wind gradually moderated as we got farther into the pack, and had declined to quite a gentle air at midnight, by which time we were between sixty and seventy miles from the pack edge; there was, however, still so much motion amongst the ice, that I have no doubt it was