The Worst Journey in the World | Page 7

certainty its
continuity or otherwise. At noon we were in latitude 76° 32´ S.,
longitude 166° 12´ E., dip 88° 24´ and variation 107° 18´ E.
"During the afternoon we were nearly becalmed, and witnessed some
magnificent eruptions of Mount Erebus, the flame and smoke being
projected to a great height; but we could not, as on a former occasion,
discover any lava issuing from the crater; although the exhibitions of
to-day were upon a much grander scale....
"Soon after midnight (February 16-17) a breeze sprang up from the
eastward and we made all sail to the southward until 4 A.M., although
we had an hour before distinctly traced the land entirely round the bay
connecting Mount Erebus with the mainland. I named it McMurdo Bay,
after the senior lieutenant of the Terror, a compliment that his zeal and
skill well merited."[10] It is now called McMurdo Sound.
In making the mistake of connecting Erebus with the mainland Ross
was looking at a distance upon the Hut Point Peninsula running out
from the S.W. corner of Erebus towards the west. He probably saw
Minna Bluff, which juts out from the mainland towards the east.
Between them, and in front of the Bluff, lie White Island, Black Island

and Brown Island. To suppose them to be part of a line of continuous
land was a very natural mistake.
Ross broke through the pack ice into an unknown sea: he laid down
many hundreds of miles of mountainous coast-line, and (with further
work completed in 1842) some 400 miles of the Great Ice Barrier: he
penetrated in his ships to the extraordinarily high latitude of 78° 11´ S.,
four degrees farther than Weddell. The scientific work of his expedition
was no less worthy of praise. The South Magnetic Pole was fixed with
comparative accuracy, though Ross was disappointed in his natural but
"perhaps too ambitious hope I had so long cherished of being permitted
to plant the flag of my country on both the magnetic Poles of our
globe."
Before all things he was at great pains to be accurate, both in his
geographical and scientific observations, and his records of
meteorology, water temperatures, soundings, as also those concerning
the life in the oceans through which he passed, were not only frequent
but trustworthy.
When Ross returned to England in 1843 it was impossible not to
believe that the case of those who advocated the existence of a South
Polar continent was considerably strengthened. At the same time there
was no proof that the various blocks of land which had been discovered
were connected with one another. Even now in 1921, after twenty years
of determined exploration aided by the most modern appliances, the
interior of this supposed continent is entirely unknown and uncharted
except in the Ross Sea area, while the fringes of the land are only
discovered in perhaps a dozen places on a circumference of about
eleven thousand miles.
In his Life of Sir Joseph Hooker, Dr. Leonard Huxley has given us
some interesting sidelights on this expedition under Ross. Hooker was
the botanist of the expedition and assistant surgeon to the Erebus, being
22 years old when he left England in 1839. Natural history came off
very badly in the matter of equipment from the Government, who
provided twenty-five reams of paper, two botanizing vascula and two
cases for bringing home live plants: that was all, not an instrument, nor
a book, nor a bottle, and rum from the ship's stores was the only
preservative. And when they returned, the rich collections which they
brought back were never fully worked out. Ross's special branch of

science was terrestrial magnetism, but he was greatly interested in
Natural History, and gave up part of his cabin for Hooker to work in.
"Almost every day I draw, sometimes all day long and till two and
three in the morning, the Captain directing me; he sits on one side of
the table, writing and figuring at night, and I on the other, drawing.
Every now and then he breaks off and comes to my side, to see what I
am after ..." and, "as you may suppose, we have had one or two little
tiffs, neither of us perhaps being helped by the best of tempers; but
nothing can exceed the liberality with which he has thrown open his
cabin to me and made it my workroom at no little inconvenience to
himself."
Another extract from Hooker's letters after the first voyage runs as
follows:
"The success of the Expedition in Geographical discovery is really
wonderful, and only shows what a little perseverance will do, for we
have been in no dangerous predicaments, and have suffered no
hardships whatever: there has been a sort of freemasonry among Polar
voyagers to keep up the credit