246 THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. CHALLENGER. 



" On February 6, after beating about for several days in fog, and lying becalmed during one 

 day, we siohted the northernmost island of tlie Macdonald Group, which was alternately brightened 

 up by sunshine and hidden in the drifting scud and mist. It consists of a small main rocky mass, 

 and two outliers with a very irregular outline and weather-beaten appearance. 



" The main mass is Macdonald Island, and gives the name to the group. It is bounded on all 

 sides by cliffs, which are high towards the eastward, but lower towards the westward. There was 

 no snow on the island, and on one stretch of sloping flat land, a covering of vegetation could be 

 made out similar to that of Heard Island. One of the outliers is in the form of a pinnacle, projecting 

 straight up from the sea. 



" We anchored at Heard Island, in Corinthian or Whisky Bay, as it is named by the sealers, 

 in the afternoon, and I landed at once with Captain Nares and Mr Buchanan. Heard Island is in 

 about lat. 53° 10' S., long. 73° 30' E., therefore in about the same latitude as the eastern entrance 

 of the Straits of Magellan, and in a corresponding latitude, in the southern hemisphere, to our city 

 of Lincoln in the northern, and it is in nearly the same longitude as Bombay. It is about twenty- 

 five miles in extreme length, and six in extreme breadth, and has an area of about eighty square 

 miles, with an elongate form, stretching in a direction about N.W. by W., and S.E. by E. The 

 southernmost extremity turns eastward, and runs out into a long narrow promontory. 



" Whisky Bay is near the northernmost extremity of the island. To the south-east of the ship, 

 as she lay in the small bay, were seen a succession of glaciers descending right down to the beach, 

 and separated by lateral moraines from one another ; six of these glaciers were visible from the 

 anchorage, forming by their terminations the coast-line eastwards. They rose with a gentle slope, 

 with the usual rounded undulating surface upwards towards the interior of the island, but their 

 origin was hid in the mist and cloud ; and Big Ben, the great mountain of the island, said to be 

 7000 feet in height, was not seen by us at all. 



" One of the glaciers, that nearest to the ship, instead of abutting on the sea-shore directly with 

 its end, as did the others, presented towards its lower extremity its side to the action of the waves, 

 and ending somewhat inland, formed a well-marked but scanty terminal moraine. 



" To the sea-shore this glacier presented a vertical wall of ice, resting directly upon the black 

 volcanic sand composing the beach. This wall exhibited a very instructive longitudinal section of 

 the glacier mass, in which the series of curved bands produced by differential motion were most 

 plainly marked, and visible from the distance of the anchorage. 



" The ioe composing the wall or cliff was evidently being constantly bulged outwards by internal 

 pressure, and masses were thus being split off to fall on the beach, and be melted, or floated off by 

 the tide. The ice splits off along the lines of tho longitudinal crevasses, and falls in slabs of the 

 whole height of the cliff; a freshly fallen slab, a longitudinal slice of the glacier, was lying on the 

 beach. Some stones which were dredged in 150 fathoms between Kerguelen Island and Heard 

 Island, Mr Buchanan J believed to have been recently dropped by floating ice from Heard Island. The 

 stones in question were as yet not penetrated by the water. The other glaciers in sight cut the 

 shore lino at right angles, and thus had no terminal moraines, the stones brought down by them 

 being washed away by tho sea. These glaciers showed all the familiar phenomena of those of 

 Europe with exact similarity. There are here the same systems of crevasses, more marked in some 

 regions than others, and dying out towards tho termination of the glacier, where the surface is smooth 

 and generally rounded. The crevasses were of the usual deep-blue colour, and the ridges separating 



1 Proc. Raj. Soc. Lond., vol. xxiv., 187G, p. COO. 



