Page:South - the story of Shackleton's last expedition, 1914-1917.djvu/486

364 of the general routine of expedition work, and simultaneously with other studies on the general life of this interesting sub-Antarctic island. Visits were made to six of the seven existing stations, observations were made on the whales landed, and useful insight was gathered as to the general working of the industry.

From South Georgia the track of the Endurance lay in a direct line to the South Sandwich Group, between Saunders and Candlemas Islands. Then south-easterly and southerly courses were steered to the Coats' Land barrier, along which we steamed for a few hundred miles until forced westward, when we were unfortunately held up in about lat. 76° 34´ S. and long. 37° 30´ W. on January 19, 1915, by enormous masses of heavy pack-ice. The ship drifted to lat. 76° 59´ S., long. 37° 47´ W. on March 19, 1915, and then west and north until crushed in lat. 69° 5´ S. and long. 51° 30´ W. on October 26, 1915. We continued drifting gradually north, afloat on ice-floes, past Graham Land and Joinville Island, and finally took to the boats on April 9, 1916, and reached Elephant Island on April 15. The Falkland Island Dependencies were thus practically circumnavigated, and it may be interesting to compare the records of whales seen in the region outside and to the south of this area with the records and the percentage of each species captured in the intensive fishing area.

The most productive part of the South Atlantic lies south of latitude 50° S., where active operations extend to and even beyond the Antarctic circle. It appears to be the general rule in Antarctic waters that whales are more numerous the closer the association with ice conditions, and there seems to be reasonable grounds for supposing that this may explain the comparatively few whales sighted by Expeditions which have explored the more northerly and more open seas, while the whalers themselves have even asserted that their poor seasons have nearly always coincided with the absence of ice, or with poor ice conditions. At all events, those Expeditions which have penetrated far south and well into the pack-ice have, without exception, reported the presence of whales in large numbers, even in the farthest south latitudes, so that our knowledge of the occurrence of whales in the Antarctic has been largely derived from these Expeditions, whose main object was either the discovery of new land or the Pole itself. The largest number of Antarctic Expeditions has concentrated on the two areas of the South Atlantic and the Ross Sea, and the records of the occurrences of whales have, in consequence, been concentrated in these two localities. In the intervening areas, however, Expeditions, notably the Belgica on the western side and the Gauss on the eastern side of the Antarctic continent, have