HISTORY OF THE ISLANDS i39 



seemed to be covered with green turf". The weather becoming hazy Cook continued to 

 the north, leaving the land " under the supposition of its being an island " with the name 

 Saunders Isle. On the morning of the 3rd he came up with the two hummocks seen 

 the previous day; he found them to be two islands with a rock between, and he called 

 them the Candlemas Islands, after the day on which they were discovered. 



Cook then continued his voyage to the east and thus missed sighting the three 

 northern islands of the group. In his journal on February 6 he writes: "I concluded 

 that what we had seen, which I named Sandwich Land, was either a group of islands, 

 or else a point of a continent. For I firmly believe that there is a track of land near the 

 pole which is the source of most of the ice that is spread over this vast Southern Ocean". 



Forty-five years later Cook's discoveries were completed and extended by the re- 

 markable work of Capt. Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen^ of the Imperial Russian 

 Navy in the corvettes 'Vostok' and 'Mirnii'. 



On December 22 1819, steering east-north-east, an island was sighted to the north 

 of any of the land discovered by Cook. It proved to be small, high and snow-covered, 

 and Bellingshausen named it Leskov, after the first lieutenant of the 'Vostok'. On the 

 next day another island, which he called Visokoi, was seen to the east. It had a high 

 mountain in the middle and was almost completely covered with ice and snow. "The 

 island is round with a circumference of about 12 miles, but it is impossible to land on 

 the steep rocky shore." Thinking that certain thick black clouds to the north betokened 

 more land Bellingshausen sailed in that direction, discovering a third island with a 

 crater "from which a thick vapour of a most unpleasant odour continually rose. As we 

 sailed with the wind along the island we noted that this vapour made a permanent dense 

 cloud and gave the impression from afar of the thick smoke which rises from the funnel 

 of an engine". Bellingshausen sailed round the island and called it Zavodovski, after 

 the second-in-command of the ' Vostok '. He hove to for the night and next day lowered 

 a boat and succeeded in making a landing. The shore party reported that half-way up 

 the mountain they found the ground warm, and that there were many penguins sitting 

 on their eggs. "A particularly bad odour came from the great quantity of bird dung, 

 and forced them to return quickly to the vessel." 



Bellingshausen called these three new islands the Marquis de Traverse Islands, and 

 then turned south to examine the lands discovered by Cook. With three chronometers 

 in place of the one which Cook carried he was able to determine their positions with 

 greater accuracy, and by sailing to the eastward of them he proved conclusively that all 

 were islands and that Cape Montagu, Cape Bristol and Southern Thule were not parts 

 of an Antarctic continent. He pushed far to the south of Southern Thule, meeting much 

 pack-ice, and on January 4 1820, reached lat. 65^ 25' S, when, "with a range of 40 miles 

 from the look-out, no continuation of the Sandwich Islands could be seen towards the 

 South ". Returning north he passed to the west of Southern Thule and Bristol and then 



1 Bellingshausen's narrative of his Antarctic voyage is extant only in Russian. The extracts here given 

 are from a translation made for the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty. An account of the voyage 

 will be found in Mill, The Siege of the South Pole, p. 114 (London, 1905). 



