34 THE SEA. 



clouds of sea-birds swaying- in great flocks to and fro over the water; but cheerful and 

 beautiful on the bright sunny morning which followed so beautiful that I thought, ( This 

 beats Tahiti \" The anchorage of the Challenger was in Cumberland Bay, a deep-water 

 inlet from which rises a semi-circle of high land, with two bold headlands, " sweeping 

 brokenly up thence to the highest ridge a square-shaped, craggy, precipitous mass of 

 rock, with trees clinging to its sides to near the summit. The spurs of these hills are 



covered with coarse grass or moss Down the beds of the small ravines run 



burns, overgrown by dock-leaves of enormous size, and the banks are clothed with a rich 

 vegetation of dark-leaved myrtle, bignonia, and winter-bark, tree-shrubs, with tall grass, 

 ferns, and flowering plants. And as you lie there, humming-birds come darting and 

 thrumming within reach of your stick, flitting from flower to flower, which dot blue and 

 white the foliage of bignonias and myrtles. And on the steep grassy slopes above the sea- 

 cliffs herds of wild goats are seen quietly browsing quietly, that is, till they scent you, when 

 they are off as wild as chamois." This is indeed a description of a rugged paradise ! 



Near the ship they found splendid, but laborious, cod-fishing; laborious on account of 

 sharks playing with the bait, and treating the stoutest lines as though made of single 

 gut; also on account of the forty-fathom depth these cod-fish lived in. Cray-fish and 

 conger-eels were hauled up in lobster-pots by dozens, while round the ship's sides flashed 

 shoals of cavalli, fish that are caught by a hook with a piece of worsted tied roughly on, 

 swished over the surface, giving splendid play with a rod. " And on shore, too, there 

 was something to be seen and done. There was Selkirk's 'look-out' to clamber up the 

 hill-side to the spot where tradition says he watched day after day for a passing sail, and 

 from whence he could look down on both sides of his island home, over the wooded 

 slopes, down to the cliff-fringed shore, on to the deserted ocean's expanse." 



The Challenger) m its cruise of over three years, naturally visited many oft-described 

 ports and settlements with which we shall have nought to do. After a visit to Kerguelen's 

 Land " the Land of Desolation," as Captain Cook called it in the Southern Indian Ocean, 

 for the purpose of selecting a spot for the erection of an observatory, from whence the 

 transit of Venus should be later observed, they proceeded to Heard Island, the position of 

 which required determining with more accuracy. They anchored, in the evening, in a bay of 

 this most gloomy and utterly desolate place, where they found half-a-dozen wretched sealers 

 living in two miserable huts near the beach, which were sunk into the ground for warmth 

 and protection against the fierce winds. Their work is to kill and boil down sea- elephants. 

 One of the men had been there for two years, and was going to stay another. They are 

 left on the island every year by the schooners, which go sealing or whaling elsewhere. 

 Some forty men were on the island, unable to communicate with each other by land, as 

 the interior is entirely covered with glacier, like Greenland. They have barrels of salt 

 pork, beef, and a small store of coals, and little else, and are wretchedly paid. "Books," 

 says Lord Campbell, "tell us that these sea-elephants grow to the length of twenty-four 

 feet; but the sealers did not confirm this at all. One of us tried hard to make the Scotch 

 mate say he had seen one eighteen feet long ; but ' waull, he couldn't say.' Sixteen feet ? 

 < Waull,' he couldn't say.' Fourteen feet? ' Waull, yes, yes something more like that;' 

 but thirteen feet would seem a fair average size One o our fellows bought a 



