ANTAKCTIC EXPLORERS 51 



by fewer navigators, and the conditions were less favourable. 

 Cook in 1774, then Bellinghausen the Russian, Weddell with 

 his furthest south of 74, and Biscoe and Balleny, Messrs. 

 Enderby's sealing captains, all between 1820 and 1839 had 

 passed the Antarctic Circle. Balleny was the immediate 

 predecessor of the French, the American, and the British 

 expeditions in 1840 and the following years. After the lapse 

 of seventy-three years the soundness of his observations has 

 received striking confirmation. In the course of his voyage 

 he obviously saw the ice wall of C6te Clairee, ' discovered ' 

 the following year by D'Urville. This, however, he took for 

 an enormous iceberg, and ultimately decided that what seemed 

 to be land behind it was probably a distant fog bank hanging 

 over the ice. Early in 1912 the Aurora, belonging to the 

 Mawson expedition, sailed over'the position of the supposed land. 

 This C6te Clairee was a sore point for the French and 

 American expeditions, for Lieutenant Wilkes 1 of the United 

 States Navy ' discovered ' it independently a week after 

 D'Urville, and a great contention for priority ensued. With 

 all Ross's admiration for the courage and endurance of both, 

 the reader divines in his plain words a touch of national pride 

 as he records at full length Balleny's superior claim, if land 

 there was, to either : more than this, he must have dimly felt 

 a kind of poetic justice in the event. For although he had 

 been on a friendly footing with Wilkes, in the outfit of whose 

 expedition he had taken much interest, and who later sent him 

 privately a chart of his discoveries before the Erebus sailed South 

 from Tasmania, he was somewhat nettled on reaching that island 

 in 1840 to find that both the French and American expeditions, 

 knowing his plans, had endeavoured to forestall them ; and he 

 writes (' Voyage ' i. 116) that this ' certainly did greatly surprise 

 me. I should have expected their national pride would have 

 caused them rather to have chosen any other path in the wide 

 field before them than one thus pointed out, if no higher con- 

 siderations had power to prevent such an interference.' 



1 Lieutenant Charles Wilkes commanded the Vincennes and its four con- 

 sorts on the Antarctic exploring expedition sent out by the United States 

 .Government in 1838-40. 



