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THE VOYAGE OF THE HURON AND THE HUNTRESS 



name to the island which Captain Davis had sailed past three years before.^^ 

 Oddly enough, the voyage of Captain John Biscoe, in the Tula, in 1832, 

 reveals that he also approached closest to the mainland in the Hughes Bay 

 area, which he describes as a deep bay, ". . . in which the water was so still that, 

 could any seals have been found, the vessels could have easily loaded. . . ."°" 



This evidence supports Davis' log and refutes the claims that Hughes Bay 

 never existed, that it was a myth invented by British cartographers.^"** Most 

 important of all, of course, is the statement of Captain Davis in the log of the 

 Huron: "I think this Southern Land to be a Continent," as he recognized the 

 land mass of Antarctica. 



As another strong bit of evidence, there is a letter written by Captain Donald 

 McKay, who was with Captain Johnson on his historic cruise of January 5 

 through 27, 1821. This letter appears in Niles Register of five months later 

 (June, 1821), dated among the Antarctic Islands "or thereabouts," latitude 

 63° south, longitude 61° west, which states, in part: 



". . . Southward of this range of islands [the South Shetlands] at a 

 distance of from fifty to eighty miles, lies a large body of land, yet but 

 little known, and will probably so remain by reason of the danger and 

 difficulty in approaching the shore, from the great quantity of floating ice 

 with which it is surrounded. This is of the same description as that of the 

 islands. . . ."101 



Captain Benjamin Morrell's description of this coast line of the Antarctic 

 Peninsula also came from Captain McKay's account of the Johnson voyage, 

 and Edmund Fanning's attempt to refute it is not in keeping with the latter's 

 character.!"^ 



The Belgica expedition of 1897-99, already referred to, has a telling line 

 in describing this coast around Hughes Bay: ". . . The Antarctic lands which 

 we visited are very mountainous and the mountains reach to the shores every- 

 where "i*** 



Daniel W. Clark, who was the first mate of the Hersilia, wrote from the 

 South Shetlands under date of February 18, 1821 (the letter directed to the 

 New Haven Journal's editor) as follows: 



". . . We have been as far south as 66 deg. and found land. How much 

 farther the land extends I know not — it is entirely covered (except the 

 low land and beaches were the seals come up) with snow and ice, at this 

 season of the year which is the middle of the summer. . . ." 



This letter was re-printed in English and French papers and journals. The 

 big question concerns the word "we." Did Clark mean the American sealers or 

 all the sealers in the South Shetland Islands at that time? It would appear to 

 refer to the American sealers in Yankee Harbor, and with the cruises of Cap- 

 tain Johnson, Davis, Burdick and McKay offered in evidence there can be little 

 doubt of the identity of the "we" in Mate Clark's important letter. Possibly 

 the officers of all the sealing craft in Yankee Harbor knew the facts. 



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