Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 1.djvu/33

Rh enterprise and to your resources, you are to use your best endeavours to withdraw from the high latitudes in time to prevent the ships being beset with the ice; but if, notwithstanding your efforts, they should be cut off from a timely retreat, you are to select the safest inlet you can find for the security of Her Majesty's ships during the winter; and you will house in the ships, and further take every possible precaution for the health and comfort of the officers and crews, which your former experience in the northern expeditions may suggest to you, and for which you have been supplied with abundant means. Having provided for these two most important objects, you will endeavour to turn your detention there to the best account, by sedulously pursuing the different series of observations which the fixed observatories will, at that time, be carrying on in concert with yours.

Should the expedition have been able to avoid wintering in a high latitude, you will return to Van Diemen's Land, availing yourself of every opportunity you can seize of pursuing there, or in such other places as your deliberate judgment may prefer, those series of observations and experiments best adapted to carrying out the leading objects of the expedition.

On the breaking up of the succeeding winter, you will resume the examination of the antarctic seas in the highest latitude you can reach, and proceeding to the eastward from the point at which you had left off the preceding year, you will seek for fresh places on which to plant your observatory in all directions from the pole.

In the event of finding any great extent of land, you will, as far as may be practicable, lay down the prominent parts of its coast line; and you will endeavour not only to correct the positions of Graham Land and Enderby Land, and other places which have been seen only at a distance, but to obtain some knowledge of the nature of those yet unvisited tracts for geographical research; and the magnetic objects of your voyage may be so conducted