

two perpendicular walls of ice, and the foaming breakers which 

 stretched across it, and the next moment we were in smooth water 

 under its lee." When daybreak came they temporarily repaired the 

 wreckage, and the ships continued on without further adventure. 

 On April 6, they reached the Falkland Islands, having been out of 

 sight of land for 136 days. 



In December 1842, Ross set sail on his. third and last Antarctic 

 cruise, this time hoping to follow in the tracks of a British sealer. 

 Captain James Weddell, who had worked his way to lat. 74° S. in 

 1823. To the east of the great peninsula that juts out from the 

 Antarctic toward South America, today known as Graham Land or 

 as Palmer Peninsula, Ross discovered several islands. Some of 

 these boasted a microscopic vegetation showing that the Antarctic 

 is not entirely barren. But ice was packing against the coast and it 

 was dangerous to linger there. They were now in the heart of one 

 of the most dangerous of all Antarctic seas, the Weddell Sea. Farther 

 east he succeeded in reaching lat. 71 "30' S., but where Weddell had 

 been lucky enough to report open sea, Ross found solid pack, so 

 he decided to turn back. 



The expedition reached England in September 1843 after an 

 absence of two and a half years and with a clean bill of health - not 

 a single case of scurvy or other serious sickness. With nine winters 

 in the Arctic and seventeen seasons of navigating behind him, Ross 

 had been able to get the best results out of a well-equipped expedi- 

 tion. Not only had he found an open sea leading deep into the 

 Antarctic continent, but he had also charted hundreds of miles of 

 the sea along the coast. They were impressive scientific results, for 

 James Clark Ross combined the qualities of a first-class naval officer 

 with those of a first-class scientist. Ross' was the last great voyage 

 of Antarctic discovery to be made in sailing ships, and another fifty 

 years were to pass before anyone attempted to explore the Antarctic 

 continent itself. When the time came, it was in the Ross sector and 

 the McMurdo Sound area that the effort was to be directed. Ross 

 returned home to a knighthood and marriage, and would have 

 been happy to settle down with his family, write his memoirs, and 

 follow his scientific interests but he was to become involved in a 

 final contest with the ice. 



The Admiralty had another polar expedition afoot, this time to 

 the Arctic. They were anxious once and for all to settle the problem 

 of the Northwest Passage. At the same time they were eager to test 

 their screw propeller under severe conditions. Sir Edward Parry 

 was at this time Comptroller of steam machinery and an ardent 

 promoter of this enterprise. The two ice veterans, Erebus and Terror, 

 were fitted with steam engines and equipped for a three-year cam- 

 paign on a lavish scale. Command was offered to Sir James Clark 

 Ross, but he declined, saying that he was too old (at forty-five). 

 Sir John Franklin, who had only recently given up the gover- 

 norship of Van Diemen's Land, accepted, although he was fifty-nine, 

 and Cro2ier took command of the Terror. 



The story of the Franklin expedition is one of the great dramas 

 of polar exploration; in fact, it became the mystery of the century. 

 Franklin's task was to work his way westward or southward as ice 

 conditions permitted, with the Bering Strait his objective. He 

 reached the west coast of Boothia without incident and found him- 

 self in a region charted by Ross. Unfortunately Ross' map showed 



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