most wonderful natural harbors. Today, known as McMurdo 

 Sound, it is one of the main centers of operation for Antarctic 

 exploration. By this time the season was too advanced for further 

 work and, having failed to find winter quarters, Ross decided to 

 head back for the comforts of Hobart. 



In December 1 841 , summer for the Southern Hemisphere, Erebus 

 and Terror once more entered the Antarctic pack ice. Ross was 

 determined to explore his sea further and to trace the seemingly 

 endless ice barrier to its conclusion. Christmas and the New Year 

 were spent with the two ships imprisoned in the ice. Ross then put 

 to practice those lessons in relaxation and morale-raising that he had 

 learned from Parry in the Arctic. An officer of the Terror, J. E. 

 Davis, described how they set up a ballroom on the frozen sea 

 between the two ships: "Captain Crozier and Miss Ross opened 

 the ball with a quadrille. After that we had reels and country dances. 

 You would have laughed to see the whole of us with thick overall 

 boots on dancing, waltzing and slipping about and all the fun 

 imaginable going on. Ladies fainting with cigars in their mouths, 

 the cure for which the gentlemen would politely thrust a piece of 

 ice down her back." 



But fortune was not to be so kind to Ross this second season. 

 Ice conditions were bad and constant gales battered the ships as 

 they crept painfully against the strong northerly current. When 

 eventually they found open water, they had traveled more than 

 eight hundred miles through the pack. Ross was now able to 

 continue the previous year's survey along the Barrier for a further 

 four hundred miles of continuous ice cliff, too high for the land 

 beyond to be seen. Then the Barrier veered to the northeast, and 

 far beyond loomed the distant mountains of the land which Captain 

 Scott later named Kind Edward VII Land. But Ross had too often 

 been deceived in the past by "mirages." He contented himself with 

 noting on his chart: "appearance of land." 



February came and young ice began to form around the ships. 

 On this voyage Ross had reached lat. 78°9' S.; the rime had come 

 to make for the north and warmer latitudes. They made good 

 progress unril they were well beyond the Antarcric Circle, but they 

 were still not out of the clutches of the ice. The greatest dangers 

 they were to encounter were bearing down on them. A heavy gale 

 with blinding snow blew up suddenly, reducing visibiUty to a few 

 yards. Dead ahead of the Erebus a huge iceberg reared up. Ross 

 brought the vessel hard over out of the monster's way, but directly 

 across the path of Terror. A collision was inevitable. Ross wrote, 

 "We instantly hove all back to diminish the violence of the shock, 

 but the concussion when she struck us was such as to throw almost 

 everyone off his feet. Our bowsprit, topmasts and other smaller 

 spars were carried away, and the ships hanging together and en- 

 tangled by their rigging, and dashing against each other with fear- 

 ful violence, were bearing down on the weather face of the lofty 

 berg under our lee." At the very last minute, the Terror, seeing a 

 dark space between the closer berg and another closing in, made a 

 dash for it and got through the gap. Erebus, helpless with her head- 

 sails gone, drifted till her yardarms scraped the face of the berg. 

 With difficulty Ross brought Erebus' head around and aimed it at 

 the now decreasing gap between the two icebergs. The Captain's 

 log continued: "She dashed through the narrow channel between 



This water color showing Mount Erebus and 

 Beaufort island, with the Erebus and 

 Terror in the foreground, was painted by 

 1. E. Davis during Ross's 1840-43 voyage. 



The telltale flat top of this Antarctic ice- 

 berg, tinted by the midnight sun, Identifies 

 it as a piece broken off one of the ice shelves. 

 Some of the blocks are a half mile across. 



52 



