Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/680

662 the French, American, and English Governments under D'Urville, Wilkes, and Ross, respectively, between the years 1838 and 1840. D'Urville left the Strait of Magellan in January, 1838, with two vessels. He penetrated with great difficulty the ice-fields which surround the pole, and reported land as lying about two hundred miles south of the Orkney Islands. The next year he attempted to explore from an opposite quarter, and reported a further discovery which he called Adelia's Land. It seems probable that most of his discoveries were only huge cliffs of ice, though he is said to have landed on a little islet off the coast in one place, and carried away quartz and gneiss rocks torn from the cliffs. He coasted along the ice-cliffs for a distance of more than one hundred miles, and thus describes their appearance:

"The walls of these blocks of ice far exceeded our masts and rigging in height; they overhung our ships, whose dimensions seemed ridiculously curtailed. We seemed to be traversing the narrow streets of some city of giants. At the foot of these gigantic mountains we perceived vast caverns hollowed by the waves, which were there ingulfed with a crashing tumult. The sun darted his oblique rays upon the immense walls of ice, making them look as if they were crystal, and presenting effects of light and shade truly magical and startling. From the summit of these mountains numerous brooks, fed by the melting ice produced by the summer heat of a January sun in these regions, threw themselves in cascades into the icy sea. Occasionally these icebergs would approach each other so as to conceal the land entirely, and we could only perceive two walls of threatening ice whose sonorous echoes sent back the word of command of the officers. The corvette which followed the Astrolabe appeared so small, and its masts so slender, that the ship's crew were seized with terror. For nearly an hour we only saw vertical walls of ice."

Wilkes, as the commander of the American expedition, charted lands which subsequent navigators failed to find. The Challenger sought in vain for what he named Termination Land, but could find only open sea. He explored the ocean for a distance of fifteen hundred miles east and west, skirting a barrier of ice often one hundred and fifty feet or more in height, and sometimes extending in an unbroken line for fifty miles.

Lastly, Sir James Ross, the commander of the English expedition, penetrated from an opposite quarter to Wilkes, and in the same year, and succeeded in reaching latitude 78°, the highest before or since attained. He found a continent which he called Victoria Land, and he describes its first appearance as follows: "On January 11, 1841, in about latitude 71° south and longitude 171° east, the Antarctic Continent was first seen, the general outline of which at once indicated its volcanic character, rising steeply from the ocean in a stupendous mountain-range, peak above peak enveloped in perpetual snow, and clustered together in countless groups resembling a vast mass of