THE VOYAGE OF THE HURON AND THE HUNTRESS 



Bellingshausen that he had discovered land to the south, as has been claimed, 

 it is fair to expect Bellingshausen to not only record such an important fact 

 but to have turned south himself to seek it. The Russian had already penetrated 

 the Antarctic circle several times searching for land and had purposely come 

 to the South Shetlands to ascertain whether or not these islands had any con- 

 nection with a southern continent. He would never have departed without in- 

 vestigating any information such as historians claim Captain Palmer gave him. 



Bellingshausen's account of his voyage to the South Shetlands is far more 

 complete in detail and date and position than most contemporary accounts. 

 His chart of the islands, with other Russian names, is not "rather crudely mapped 

 from a distance," as the late Professor William H. Hobbs claimed, but an 

 excellent piece of work.^^ 



Captain Palmer spent no longer than three quarters of an hour aboard the 

 Vostok, then returned to the Hero}^ By noon, Bellingshausen's two vessels 

 were twelve miles further east, proceeding alongshore, and at 1 :30 o'clock his 

 journal records him off the mouth of Yankee Sound. He states: "The shore we 

 had held from 4 o'clock in the morning up to this time proved to be an island, 

 41 miles long, lying E by N ^^ E. . . ."^'^ This, of course, was Livingston Island. 



From all the evidence, it would appear that Palmer's log of the Hero, now 

 in the Library of Congress, is in some respects strangely incomplete. This 

 is further shown by the fact that there is no mention of his meeting with Bel- 

 lingshausen and for several days in mid-February, 1821, only one line is entered 

 each day, and no entries at all from February 19 to February 22.^^ 



It is a great pity that only this incomplete record of the Fanning fleet's ac- 

 tivities of the 1820-21 season can be found. It was Captain Benjamin Pendle- 

 ton, the commander of the fleet, to whom Edmund Fanning attributes the first 

 sighting of the Antarctic Continent from the mountains of Deception Island.^^ 

 But Fanning, writing in his later years, obviously confused his recollections of 

 the fleet's 1820-21 and 1821-22 voyages to the South Shetlands. It was during 

 the 1821-22 season that the Fanning fleet was at Deception Island, using it 

 as a base. 



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