Of coals there could not be too much. Coals mean heat and power, and therefore life itself.
His reappearance in Bell’s Sound, as the well-sheltered little creek, which the Walrus had chosen as her Antarctic home, had been named, would be awaited with a very great deal of anxiety indeed.
THE MARVELS OF THE ANTARCTIC.
Boys of an inquiring turn of mind will read the following brief notes with interest, I feel certain. And I rejoice to say that, among my hundreds of thousands of young British readers, there is a very large number who prefer the solid and lasting to the romantic and ephemeral. We all love heroes, and delight in their deeds of derring-do, but we all want to know a little about the world we live in.
I must refer you to books for the history and adventures of the chief heroes of the Antarctic. Sir James Clark Ross, who sailed about in these regions as far back as 1840 and forward, was certainly a hero in every sense of the word, and considering that he had neither proper instruments for scientific observation, nor steam-power, his brave deeds and discoveries are truly marvellous. The great Ross sea to the East of Victoria Land is named after him, is a monument indeed, which while the world lasts can never be destroyed, to British pluck and endurance. His was, however, a voyage of research with the view of finding out the Magnetic Pole, which, no schoolboy need be reminded, is different from the true axis of the earth—the centre line from south to north round which the world revolves, as does a wheel upon its axle.
Do I make this sufficiently clear to you? The axis or axle poles are the rotation poles, but the magnetic poles do not, as I said, coincide. This world itself, therefore, is just a gigantic spherical magnet. At these poles the dipping-needle stands vertical. The discovery of these poles, of course, enables us to correct our navigation charts, but as the magnetic forces are not constant, the more closely they are studied the better.
Enough of that, which is a long and, I fear, a dry subject.
Mount Erebus and Mount Terror lie at the southernmost and westernmost end of Ross’s great sea. They are still active volcanoes, standing over twelve and ten thousand feet respectively above the sea’s level.
Along the base of Ross’s sea runs a gigantic barrier of ice, hundreds of feet high, which seems to tell the pigmy man that thus far may he come, but no further. Within the next hundred years, however, that pigmy means to wrench most of its secrets from Nature.
We all owe much to the cruise of the gallant Belgica, in 1898-1900; she reached a southern latitude of about 78° or over.