100 THE VOYAGE : PASSING IMPKESSIONS 



We proceeded to Kerguelen's Land, and after twice 

 being blown off in a gale we at last, on May 12, anchored 

 in Christmas Harbour. During the passage there were 

 few sea-animals, so I studied Cape plants with Harvey, 

 Endlicher, 1 and De Candolle. 2 



From a distance the Island looks like terraces of black 

 rocks ; on which the snow lies, causing it to look striped 

 in horizontal bands. On the melting of the snow, the flats 

 appear covered with green grass and the hills with brown 

 and yellow tufts of vegetation. The shores are almost 

 everywhere bounded by high, steep precipices, some of 

 frightful height, above which the land rises in ledges to the 

 tops of the hills. The varied colour in the vegetation gave 

 me hopes that the country might be rich in mosses, &c. 

 [nor could anything the ingenious Mr. Anderson in ' Cook's 

 Voyages ' said persuade me to the contrary. . . . Surely, 

 I thought, this cannot be such a land of desolation as Cook 

 has painted it, containing only eighteen species of plants]. 



Christmas Harbour is well described and figured by 

 Cook, indeed the accuracy with which he made a running 

 survey of the coast is quite marvellous, and shows how 

 talented a man he was. I cannot say so much of his 

 Surgeon and Botanist, ' The ingenious Mr. Anderson/ as 

 our copy calls him. Had Cook been here in winter he would 

 have found it a different place to lie in from what it is in 

 summer ; the winds blow into it from the N. W. with the most 

 incredible fury, preventing sometimes for days any inter- 

 course with the shore. We have the chain cables of a 28 

 gun-ship, and yet we drove with 3 anchors and 150 fathoms 

 of chain on the best-bower, 60 on the small, and a third 

 anchor under foot, the Sheet. Such a thing was never heard 

 of before ! 



1 Stephen Ladislas Endlicher (1804-49), a Hungarian, Professor of Botany 

 in Vienna from 1840, and author of a Genera Plantarum. 



2 Augustin Pyrame De Candolle (1778-1841), a Genevese whose most 

 important work was done in France between 1796 and 1816, when he returned 

 to Geneva. He used his immense knowledge of botany to become the leading 

 systematist of his period. (For the adoption of his system by Bentham and 

 Hooker in the Gen. PL, see ii. 19 seq., 22, 415. ) Beginning to work out his great 

 system on.too large a scale (1818-21) he continued it in the more manageable 

 Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetdbilis, in seventeen volumes, 1824-73, 

 ten of which were the work of his son and successor, Alphonse. The latter, like 

 Hooker, was strongly interested in distribution and economic botany, writing 

 a Geographic Botanique in 1855 and Origine des Pktntes Cultivees in 1883. 



