PREVIOUS CRUISES AND PURPOSES OF CRUISE VII 11 



only one stop, desolate South Georgia at that! Gales blew on 

 52 of the 118 days required for the 17,000-mile journey through 

 ice and snow. Some of the bergs were as much as five miles 

 long and five hundred feet high. Captain iVult refers to them 

 as "unpleasant sailing companions amidst the almost continuous 

 fogs and blizzards of the Southern Ocean." To reduce the speed 

 and to give the lookout an unobstructed view, the foresail was 

 constructed in the shape of a triangle. 



Probably the fastest voyage the Carnegie ever made was from 

 New York to Hammerfest — 4800 miles in 24 days. Not a reef 

 was taken, as she ploughed through the rough seas of the North 

 Atlantic. On this same cruise she very nearly came to grief off 

 Spitzbergen, when a strong southerly gale almost bottled her 

 up in an ice-pack to the north. She managed to clear this and 

 proceeded to Iceland, where the party first learned that the Great 

 War had been declared. 



After every cruise there were tales of unusual and thrilling ex- 

 periences. The vessel has scudded along at nine knots under 

 bare poles near Wake Island. She once passed a corpse at 60° 

 south, far both from land and from trade-routes; this had been 

 the only sight of a human being encountered in four months, 

 except for the whalers of South Georgia. On another occasion 

 she set mail adrift in a copper box near Kerguelen Island contain- 

 ing abstracts of the scientific results during the first part of the 

 sub-antarctic cruise; this was done so that if the ship were lost 

 the records at least might be picked up. Again she had to navi- 

 gate close to shore on the west coast of Africa through a red fog, 

 caused by a harmattan, which brought the visible horizon to 

 within less than half a mile from the ship. And after success- 

 fully making port at Dakar, she found the city so riddled with 

 plague that she was forced to leave at once for Buenos Aires. 



Another branch of geophysics is the study of the electric state 

 of the Earth and its atmosphere. The entire Earth is charged 

 with negative electricity. Although this charge is constantly 

 being dissipated into the air, its total is not permanently diminished. 

 Here we are face to face with a mystery, and we must find the 

 source of this negative charge of the Earth. 



