Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/143

 He knew not but that the brig was in need of medical aid or had important communications to make. It was truly surprising what could prompt him to pursue such  a course, for during my twenty years’ experience before  the mast — and I have cruised among pretty nearly all  nations — I have found the French people to be the  most courteous and polite of any whom I have met.

This distinguished French navigator, Commodore Dumont d’Urville, had discovered land eleven days previous, in the evening of the 19th of February, in latitude  65° south, longitude 142° east. He said it averaged over a thousand feet high, and was entirely covered with  ice and snow. He cruised along its shore to the westward about one hundred and fifty miles, where it suddenly turned to the south, and here he met our brig Porpoise. Land was then in sight. He named this land La Terre Adélie, for his wife. The next day, the 1st of February, he bore away for Hobart Town, where  he arrived after an absence of forty-nine days.

The next year, 1849, Captain Sir James Ross of the British navy visited these seas. How far he was guided by the copy of our chart and log, sent him by Commodore Wilkes, and which he never acknowledged, can  only be surmised. The English admiral’s ships, the Erebus and Terror, were unlike the Frenchman’s and  our ships. They were so strongly built that they were forced through a thick belt of ice two hundred miles  into an open sea beyond. Our ships would have been completely destroyed before they could have penetrated  one-quarter of the distance. Sir James Ross left Hobart Town on the 12th of November, 1841. Entering the