XVill WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
complaints have been made to me that Scott’s Last Expe- 
dition plunges the general reader into a neighbourhood 
which he is supposed to know all about, while actually he 
is lost, having no idea what the Discovery was, or where 
Castle Rock or Hut Point stand. For the better under- 
standing of the references to particular expeditions, to the 
lands discovered by them and the traces left by them, 
which must occur in this book I give the following brief 
introduction. 
From the earliest days of the making of maps of the 
Southern Hemisphere it was supposed that there was a 
great continent called Terra Australis. As explorers pene- 
trated round the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, and 
found nothing but stormy oceans beyond, and as, later, 
they discovered Australia and New Zealand, the belief in 
this continent weakened, but was not abandoned. During 
the latter half of the eighteenth century eagerness for 
scientific knowledge was added to the former striving after 
individual or State aggrandizement. 
Cook, Ross and Scott: these are the aristocrats of the 
South. 
It was the great English navigator James Cook who 
laid the foundations of our knowledge. In 1772 he sailed 
from Deptford in the Resolution, 462 tons, and the Ad- 
venture, 336 tons, ships which had been built at Whitby 
for the coal trade. He was, like Nansen, a believer in a 
varied diet as one of the preventives of scurvy, and men- 
tions that he had among his provisions “besides Saur 
Krout, Portable Broth, Marmalade of Carrots and Suspis- 
sated Juice of Wort and Beer.” Medals were struck “ to 
be given to the natives of new discovered countries, and left 
there as testimonies of our being the first discoverers.” 4 
It would be interesting to know whether any exist now. 
After calling at the Cape of Good Hope Cook started 
to make his Easting down to New Zealand, purposing to 
sail as far south as possible in search of a southern con- 
tinent. He sighted his first ‘ice island’ or iceberg in 
lat. 50° 40’ S., long..2° 0’ E4 on December 1¢6,,199a8 
1 Cook, 4 Voyage towards the South Pole, Introduction. 
