COLLECTING IN ANTARCTIC SEAS. 3 
quite close to its junction with Mount Erebus and extending seawards for some ten 
miles, but nowhere more than a mile across. Its extremity was about nine miles from 
Hut Point. North of this lay four small islands. These have since been named the 
Dellbridge Islands. The more westerly one of these was about a mile from the Glacier 
Snout, and called “Tent Island,” as close by it a camp was established when the 
attempt was made to assist nature by sawing a channel for the ship through the ice. 
The camp was maintained for some time after the sawing-out operations had been 
abandoned, and for a short time some dredging operations were conducted among the 
numerous ice cracks round the island. A bare mile to the north was Inaccessible 
Island, so called on account of the difficulty of exploring it by a single individual, not 
on account of its real inaccessibility. These two islands were about the same size, and 
perhaps a quarter of a mile long, between 300 and 400 feet high. A couple of miles 
further on, on the lowest slopes of Mount Erebus, was Skuary Point, a broad expanse of 
basaltic rubble and patches of snow where the Skua, Megalestris maccormicki, bred in 
large numbers. It was from this place that most of their eggs were taken for 
scientific and domestic purposes. f 
The shore line is not much indented, except here and there, where precipitous 
cliffs are exposed. It is covered by a vertical wall of ice varying from between 
two and a hundred feet in height, consequently there is no tidal zone. Access 
to the shore from the sea or vice versd is in many places rendered easy by the 
“drift” slopes which speedily accumulate in winter. In the neighbourhood of Cape 
Royds the shore is not so precipitous, and a small tidal zone exists, consisting 
of boulders and volcanic sand. This area was not explored till the relief ships 
arrived in 1904, and then it was not possible to do much. Red Aleve were however 
seen to be abundant. 
The state of the ice in the Sound is almost entirely dependent on the weather, 
and that is an efficient explanation of our failure to escape from Winter Quarters 
during the summer of 1902-3. A three days’ blizzard at the beginning of May, 
1902, when the ice was about two feet thick, swept every particle of it out of the 
Sound, again exposing the area that was open when we arrived in February. In the 
following September a gale again swept out the ice, and we had open water to well 
within eight miles of Hut Point. Events of this kind are however accidental. 
Large areas of the Ross Sea are known to be ice-free at irregular intervals, very 
early in the season, after the return of the sun on August 23rd. Whatever the 
condition of the fixed ice in the Sound, aJl through the summer the mouth is choked 
at irregular intervals with fields of loose ice, brought in by wind and weather from 
unknown localities, most probably from the eastward, the current setting from that 
quarter. Part at least of these fields are eddied into the Sound as they are 
directed northward by the trend of the coast. It is the frequent presence of these 
masses of loose ice that damps down the swell that may occur in the Ross Sea, and 
so retards the breaking-up of the fixed ice. During the season of 1902-3 the open 
B2 
