Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/29

Rh peaks in the distance, but there is considerable doubt if that was actually the case. (The Voyage of the Scotia, R. C. Mossman, J. H. H. Pirie, and R. N. Rudmose Brown: Edinburgh, 1906, p. 236.) If there were mountains they must have been at a great distance; all that I could see from the ship along the 150 miles of coast-line that we mapped was the iceclad land rising inland in undulating slopes to an unknown height.

There are several other points to be considered, but what I wish to emphasise here is, that there is round about the South Pole a continent of enormous size, filling almost the whole region within the Antarctic Circle, and that it is probably one, and not two land masses. This continent has an area of about five and a half million square miles, an area equal to that of Europe and Australia combined. Outside this great continent, almost entirely iceclad, lies the Great Southern or Antarctic Ocean. In the far south of this there is relatively fine weather broken intermittently with terrific storms—blizzards from Antarctica. In the more northern parts of this ocean there is continual stormy weather from the west, which causes high seas to run, and earns for this part of our globe the name of the "roaring forties" and the "shrieking fifties." That part of the Great Southern Ocean which