146 SOUTH AGAIN : NEW ZEALAND AND THE CAPE 



' Indeed, his lifelong friend, Archibald Smith,^ v/riting on 

 August 3, 1842, tells Hooker that the public have less 

 interest in the expedition than should be if they understood 

 its aims. ' But,' he adds, * Eoss will deserve a peerage if he 

 gets to the pole, and I have got a motto from Virgil ready 

 for him — " Polo dimoverat umbram." ' And Dr. Sinclair, 

 returning from New Zealand, found himself greatly in demand. 

 He had seen the half fabulous Discoverers with his own eyes. 



People read so much fiction nowadays [he writes from 

 Edinburgh in January 1843], and your labours have had 

 sufficient of it to make a similar impression, that they 

 were glad to hear a living man and not a book express his 

 readiness to swear he saw you going on a-discovering as daily 

 work. 



Moreover, when in March 1843 Sir William Hooker obtained 

 the Admiralty's permission to draw up for his ' Journal of 

 Botany ' a general account of what Joseph had done, he found 

 that already in Paris they had begun to publish the Botany 

 of D'Urville's last voyage, including some of Joseph's best and 

 newest plants, though without any text so far, while a specimen 

 of the white Chionis, sent home by' some member of the Expedi- 

 tion, was bought by a German and described in Germany. 

 Clearly there should have been a Committee, as in France, to 

 issue a preliminary report, reserving full descriptions till the 

 return of the Expedition. 



Sir William's article, when it appeared, pleased Captain 

 Koss and the officers generally, excepting Captain Crozier, 

 who was much offended — so sailors love their ships — by the 

 description of the Terror as a ' heavy sailer.' 



For the sake of contrast with to-day, an impression of 

 Capetown in the forties' may be recorded at some length, 



1 Archibald Smith (1813-72) was the only son of ' Smith of Jordan Hill.' 

 He was Senior Wrangler in 1836, and entering Lincoln's Inn, became a dis- 

 tinguished real property lawyer. His most living interest, however, remained 

 in mathematics, both pure and applied, and his working out of the practical 

 formulae for the correction of observations on board ship and especially for 

 determining the effect of the iron in a ship on the compass, incorporated in an 

 Admiralty Manual of 1862, were of the highest value. In 1865 he was awarded 

 a gold medal by the Royal Society, of which he had been a Fellow since 1856. 



