During the night of the 20th, the ship was kept moving slowly southward. It was another night of anxiety, though there were few icebergs about, and no pack-ice; yet the proximity to an unknown coast and the uncertainty of our position, with unsettled weather, made us all but comfortable. In the morning it was misty. Numerous small icebergs were about us, and while trying to dodge these we made another discovery—we struck a rock. This time we did not go on to it as easily as we did in Beagle Channel. We struck with a force that made the ship tremble and crack from stem to stern. We needed no call to come on deck, but after reaching it, we could not see what had happened.
“We struck an iceberg,” some one said.
“Yes; a black one,” said Knudsen.
A few moments later the fog lifted, and we saw white crests and black rocks about us on every side. The good old ship was turned; she rolled off and struck two or three other rocks, and then steamed away, none the worse for it. As we withdrew we watched the small icebergs being dashed to pieces on the same rocks, and wondered if that would not be our fate with the next encounter.
At about noon on the 21st, the horizon cleared a little, giving us an opportunity to pass safely from the rocks and bergs around us. Sail Rock was visible on our port, but nothing else except the dim outline of Deception Island and the rocks eastward. Sail Rock is remarkable from a distance; it has the appearance of a ship under sail; but at close range it is more like a house with a gable-roof. It is a solid rock about four hundred feet high, a thousand feet long, and five hundred feet wide. The sides for three or four hundred feet are perpendicular, offering no beach, and no ledge as a resting-place for birds, except at the peak. As we had Sail Rock over our quarter, the weather changed; the bright gray of the waters became black, the sky grew lead-coloured, and penguins jumped out of the water and then rushed through it landward with electric swiftness, as if to warn us of a coming storm. The storm, however, did not come until the morning of the 22d.
Cormorants at Home.
Arctowski gathering Geological Specimens, observed by a Megalestris.
(Cape Lancaster in the Background.)