Curious Weather-worn Icebergs, 300 Feet High.
Indeed, we ought to be contented with the unparalleled series of scientific records which are now written in our journals. Beginning with Tierra del Fuego, we have secured ethnological data of a race of primitive people, scientifically unknown; there we have also read the story of two vanishing American races; while the naturalist and geologist have worked out facts and gathered specimens unique in value and usefulness. We have sounded the unknown seas between the terminating point of South America and the antarctic land. In the new regions south of Cape Horn we have discovered many islands, and several hundred miles of the coast of a great country. Passing into the pack-ice we have drifted thousands of miles over the bed of a virgin sea; have discovered a great submarine bank, and have collected skeletons and skins of a curious life, previously almost unknown. Racovitza has hundreds of bottles of odd-looking specimens of creatures in alcohol, and his notes record, for the first time, the life story of antarctic fauna throughout the year. Arctowski has a record of hourly meteorological observations taken systematically, night and day, during one year. This, too, is a valuable record, for previously we have had only a few short notes on the climate of the summer months of the antarctic. Lecointe has made a painstaking series of magnetic observations, which will be useful in making valuable deductions for the compass, in the southern hemisphere. There are many studies valuable to oceanographic sciences, and our examination of a part of the great restless sea of ice, which encircles the pole, will be the basis of all future work in this region. We shall emerge from an area of perennial winter, never before invaded by man, with the knowledge of having been the first of all human beings to pass through the south polar winter and its long night. We feel, one and all, that our mission has been accomplished, and we are waiting impatiently to be freed from this embrace of the frozen sea.
January 9.—From the first to the ninth there was little of interest aside from the usual run of life. We took a few Ross seals (Ommatophoca Rossi), saw two new birds, but did not secure them, and were generally busy preparing the ship for the home voyage. We have had a continuous southerly wind, but its force was so light that we drifted little, though our sounding yesterday was 1490 m., which we take as an encouragement of a northerly movement off of the shallow sea over which we have floated so long. The bergs continue to change positions, but our pan, which is a little over two miles in diameter, is the same as it was two months ago, except that the snow has melted to an average thickness of about a half metre. Because our floe has not changed its form or shown any signs of disruption since November first, and also because we have had no ice-destroying tempest since that time, we have no good reason to suppose that we shall have a storm, or that our floe will fracture in a line to liberate us during the remaining two months of possible navigation.
Star-Fish and Sea-Urchins from the Bottom of the Antarctic Sea.
A New Shrimp of the Genera of Euphausia, Discovered by Racovitza. It is the Staple Food of the Penguins and Seals.
There is at present sufficient water in long leads to navigate, and to reach this is the ambition of all on board, from the Commandant to the cabin-boy. But thus far we have done nothing to liberate the ship. It is true, our men have had more than sufficient work to prepare the sleeping Belgica for the sea, but for this they will have sufficient time during the many days when we shall be pressing out of the pack. If we do not help ourselves, as matters go now there is a great possibility of wintering again in the pack. To do something in this direction, I submitted, yesterday, a plan to the Commandant. It is based on the fact that the sun acts much more powerfully upon water, and upon everything else of a dark colour, than upon snow. Keeping this in mind, my suggestion involves the digging of two trenches, one from the bow, the other from the stern to the water, at the edge of the Belgica field. These trenches are to be carried through the snow and the superficial fresh water sheet of ice, leaving a narrow current of water from the ship to the lead, which we hope by the aid of the sun will so weaken the ice in this direction that it may break in this line. Otherwise it might fracture, if it fractured at all, a mile to the other side of us, and then our position would be no better than it is now.