He And His Crew, Victims Of Scurvy, Were Unable To
Manage Their Vessel In A Storm; And It Was At Length Wrecked On A
Barren Island, There, Where "Want, Nakedness, Cold, Sickness,
Impatience, And Despair, Were Their Daily Guests," Behring, His
Lieutenant, And The Master Died.
Now we must put a girdle round the world, and do it with the speed
of Ariel.
Here we are already in the heats of the equator. We can
do no more than remark, that if air and water are heated at the
equator, and frozen at the poles, there will be equilibrium
destroyed, and constant currents caused. And so it happens, so we
get the prevailing winds, and all the currents of the ocean. Of
these, some of the uses, but by no means all, are obvious. We urge
our "Phantom" fleetly to the southern pole. Here, over the other
hemisphere of the earth, there shines another hemisphere of heaven.
The stars are changed; the southern cross, the Magellanic clouds,
the "coal-sack" in the milky way, attract our notice. Now we are in
the southern latitude that corresponds to England in the north; nay,
at a greater distance from the Pole, we find Kerguelen's Land,
emphatically called "The Isle of Desolation." Icebergs float much
further into the warm sea on this side of the equator before they
dissolve. The South Pole is evidently a more thorough refrigerator
than the North. Why is this? We shall soon see. We push through
pack-ice, and through floes and fields, by lofty bergs, by an island
or two covered with penguins, until there lies before us a long
range of mountains, nine or ten thousand feet in height, and all
clad in eternal snow. That is a portion of the Southern Continent.
Lieutenant Wilkes, in the American exploring expedition, first
discovered this, and mapped out some part of the coast, putting a
few clouds in likewise - a mistake easily made by those who omit to
verify every foot of land. Sir James Ross, in his most successful
South Pole Expedition, during the years 1839-43, sailed over some of
this land, and confirmed the rest. The Antarctic, as well as the
Arctic honours he secured for England, by turning a corner of the
land, and sailing far southward, along an impenetrable icy barrier,
to the latitude of seventy-eight degrees, nine minutes. It is an
elevated continent, with many lofty ranges. On the extreme southern
point reached by the ships, a magnificent volcano was seen spouting
fire and smoke out of the everlasting snow. This volcano, twelve
thousand four hundred feet high, was named Mount Erebus; for the
Erebus and Terror long sought anxiously among the bays, and sounds,
and creeks of the North Pole, then coasted by the solid ice walls of
the south.
H. M.
A DISCOURSE WRITTEN BY SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT, KNIGHT.
To prove a Passage by the North-West to Cathay and the East Indies.
CHAPTER I. - TO PROVE BY AUTHORITY A PASSAGE TO BE ON THE NORTH SIDE
OF AMERICA, TO GO TO CATHAY AND THE EAST INDIES.
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