HKB
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.