THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 23 



ALG^ OF KERGUELEN'S LAND. 



Notes on the Alg^ collected by Mr. R. Hall, on 

 Kerguelen's Land, in 1898. 

 By Henry Thos. Tisdall. . 

 {Read before the Field Naturalists^ Cluhof Victoria, 13th February, 1899.) 



Before speaking of the seaweeds of Kerguelen's Land it is 

 necessary to take a brief view of its surroundings. 



In the year 1772 a French vessel commanded by Ives Julian 

 de Kerguelen Tremaric, after passing to the south-east of the Cape of 

 Good Hope, was caught in a violent storm and driven considerably 

 out of the usual course. After many days the storm ceased, and 

 Kerguelen found himself in an awkward predicament. A heavy 

 steaming fog surrounded the ship, which quite eclipsed the sun, 

 and so prevented him from finding his latitude. The ship's 

 course was impeded by a mass of floating seaweed, and it took him 

 some days to extricate the vessel from its embraces. At last the 

 fog rose, the blue sky appeared once more, and to his astonishment 

 Kerguelen saw before him a new land. As Sir Joseph Hooker 

 describes it — " The island presents a black and rugged mass 

 of sterile mountains, rising by parallel steppes one above another 

 in alternate slopes and precipices, terminating in frightful naked 

 and frowning cliffs, which dip perpendicularly into the sea. The 

 snow lying upon these slopes between the black cliffs gives a most 

 singularly striped and banded appearance to the whole country, 

 each band indicating a flow of volcanic matter, for the island is 

 covered with craters, whose vents have given issue to stream upon 

 stream of molten rock. These are worn all along the coasts into 

 abrubt escarpments, rendering a landing impracticable except at 

 the heads of the sinUous bays." This was the country that 

 Kerguelen and his crew of frightened sailors gazed at. After 

 carefully rounding the rocky prominences, they at length found 

 the entrance to a large, well-sheltered bay — presumably Christmas 

 Harbour, which lies to the south of Kerguelen, or, as Capt. Cook 

 called it some time afterwards, the Island of Desolation. The island 

 is 100 miles long and about 50 miles wide, but is so indented with 

 fiords, harbours, gulfs, and bays that hardly any part of it is more 

 than a few miles from the sea. It lies in the Southern Ocean, 

 about 3,500 miles S.E. from the Cape of Good Hope and 3,000 

 miles from the extreme west coast of Australia. As this paper only 

 deals with the seaweeds of this remarkable island, we will only 

 take a glance at its position with regard to ocean currents. The 

 great counter current comes from the west and passes both north 

 and south of the island, so that, as we might expect, the seaweeds 

 drifted to the island come from that direction. On comparing the 

 list of seaweeds which were found by Sir J. Hooker during the 

 voyage of the Erebus and Terror at the Falkland Islands with 



