Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/166

162 are apt to get damaged or carried away. Consequently the greatest vigilance has to be used: long poles have to be in readiness to push the heavier pieces of ice away from the place where the net is expected to come to the surface by the people on the ship and on the ice itself. The winch-man has constantly to be on the alert to "heave gently!" "stop!" "heave gently!" or what always produces such a cheery effect, "heave away!" Nothing is more exciting, nothing more intensely interesting than to hear the merry winch under perfect control heaving in the vertical net, or the trawl culminating in the final act of "taking it aboard." Reaching the South Pole isn't in it! At the beginning of such a voyage of exploration there are apt to be smiles at the eager zoologist emerging pale from his laboratory, but after the first time the trawl comes on board with its wonderful burden of living things of every colour and shape, each more quaint or beautiful than its neighbour, everybody on board becomes almost as enthusiastic as the zoologist who, now that he has got his sea-legs, feels himself more on an equal footing with his breezy seaman companions.

Off Coats Land, the highest southern latitude in which a vertical net has been successfully used, it is recorded by Wilton in the Zoological Log of the "Scotia," that the haul