48 THE OCEAN WORLD. 



These icy cliffs present a face more or less disintegrated as they 

 approach to the rocky shore. The blocks of ice form at first huge 

 prisms, or tabular regular masses ; but they get broken up by degrees, 

 and rounded off and separated under the action of the waves, which 

 chafe them, and their colour becomes more and more limpid and 

 bluish. They ascend freely towards the north, often in spite of the 

 winds and currents which tend to carry them in the contrary direction. 

 One year with another these floating icebergs accumulate with very 

 striking differences, and it is only by a rare chance that they open up 

 a free passage such as Captain Weddell had discovered. These 

 floating islands of ice have been met with in 35^ south latitude, and 

 even as high as Cape Horn. 



The two French ships frequently found themselves shut up in the 

 icebergs, which continued to press upon them while driven before 

 the north winds, then the south wind would again disperse their vast 

 masses, enabling the ships to issue from their prison all safe and 

 sound. In some cases D'Urville found it necessary to force his ships 

 through fields of ice by which he was surrounded and imprisoned, 

 and to cut his way by force through the accumulating blocks, using 

 the corvette as a sort of battering ram. In 1838 he recognised, about 

 fifty leagues from the South Orkney Isles, a coast, to which he gave 

 the name of Louis Philippe s and Joiindllis Land. This coast is 

 covered with enormous masses of ice, which seemed to rise to the 

 height of 2,600 feet. The crew of D'Urville's ship being sickly and 

 overworked, he returned to the port of Chili, whence he again issued 

 for the South Pole in the following January. 



On this occasion his approach was made from a point diame- 

 trically opposite to his former attempt. He very soon found himself 

 in the middle of the ice. He discovered within the Antarctic Circle 

 land, to which he gave the name of Adelia's Lafid. The long and 

 lofty cliffs of this island or continent he describes as being surrounded 

 by a belt of islands of ice at once numerous and threatening. D'Urville 

 did not hesitate to navigate his corvettes through the middle of the 

 band of enormous icebergs which seemed to guard the Pole and 

 forbid his approach to it. For some time his vessels were so 

 surrounded that they had reason to fear, from moment to moment, 

 some terrible shock, some irreparable disaster. In addition to this, 

 the sea produces around these floating icebergs, eddies, which were 

 not unlikely to draw on the ship to the destruction with which it was 

 threatened at every instant. It was in passing at their base that 

 D'Urville was able to judge of the height of these icy cliffs. "The 

 walls of these blocks of ice," he savs. " far exceeded our masts and 



