Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/348

332 demonstration; indeed, the fact that such a large mass of apparently continuous ice exists circumpolarly speaks against the conclusion, and it is probably the one most significant circumstance which has led to favor the view of continentality. It must be observed, however, that the continuousness of the so-called antarctic continent rests upon somewhat insecure and far from confirmatory evidence. The open sea (with only three ice islands visible from the mast) that confronted Weddell at the seventy-fourth degree of latitude speaks volumes in its, own behalf, and is evidence of a kind which is rather strengthened than otherwise—as proving the insularity of the ice—by the subsequent findings of Biscoe, D'Urville, Ross, and Grant, who found it impossible to penetrate to within eight hundred or a thousand miles of the position reached by Weddell.

In the same year with Weddell, Captain Benjamin Morrell, Jr., sailing from New York, reached in Weddell's track (March 14th), latitude 70° 14′ south, and he also describes the sea as being "entirely free of field ice," and stated that "there were not more than a dozen ice islands in sight. At the same time the temperature both of the air and the water was at least thirteen degrees higher (more mild) than we had ever found it between the parallels of sixty and sixty-two south. We were now in latitude 70° 14′ south, and the temperature of the air was 47°, and that of the water 44°." Morrell significantly adds, "I have several times passed within the Antarctic Circle, on different meridians, and have uniformly found the temperature both of the air and the water to become more and more mild the farther I advanced beyond the sixty-fifth degree of south latitude"; and further: "I regret extremely that circumstances would not permit me to proceed farther south, when I was in latitude 70° 14′ south, on Friday, the 14th day of March, 1823, as I should then have been able, without the least doubt, to penetrate as far as the eighty-fifth degree of south latitude" (op. cit., page 67).

Not much weight can be attached to the latter part of this statement, as it is well the experience of polar navigators how suddenly the presumably "open seas" close up; yet it would be nothing short of an assumption to place a barrier where it has in fact not been seen to exist. The circumstance that navigators who have followed Morrell found impenetrable barriers north of Weddell's and Morrell's positions is no evidence of what lies southward of them, and so far as anything that we now know of to the contrary, King George IV Sea may extend quite to or even across the pole. Both Weddell and Morrell experienced winds from the south in this water; the former, writing on the 18th of