xxii WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
south of the Atlantic, having sailed toa latitude of 74° 15'S. 
in longitude 34° 16’ W. 
Had there been a Tetrahedronal Theory in those days, 
some one might have suggested the probability of a third 
indentation beneath the Indian Ocean, probably to be 
laughed at for his pains. When James Clark Ross started 
from England in 1839 there was no particular reason for 
him to suppose that the Antarctic coast-line in the region 
of the magnetic Pole, which he was to try to reach, did not 
continue to follow the Antarctic Circle. 
Ross left England in September 1839 under instruc- 
tions from the Admiralty. He had under his command 
two of Her Majesty’s sailing ships, the Erebus, 370 tons, 
and the Terror, 340 tons. Arriving in Hobart, Tasmania, 
in August 1840, he was met by news of discoveries made 
during the previous summer by the French Expedition 
under Dumont D’Urville and the United States Expedi- 
tion under Charles Wilkes. The former had coasted along 
Adélie Land, and for sixty miles of ice cliff to the west 
of it. He brought back an egg now at Drayton which 
Scott’s Discovery Expedition definitely proved to be that 
of an Emperor penguin. 
All these discoveries were somewhere about the lati- 
tude of the Antarctic Circle (66° 32’ S.) and roughly in 
that part of the world which lies to the south of Australia. 
Ross, ‘‘ impressed with the feeling that England had ever 
Jed the way of discovery in the southern as well as in the 
northern region, ... resolved at once to avoid all inter- 
ference with their discoveries, and selected a much more 
easterly meridian (170° E.), on which to penetrate to the 
southward, and if possible reach the magnetic Pole.” } 
The outlines of the expedition in which an unknown 
and unexpected sea was found, stretching 500 miles south- 
wards towards the Pole, are well known to students of Ant- 
arctic history. After passing through the pack he stood 
towards the supposed position of the magnetic Pole,“ steer- 
ing as nearly south by the compass as the wind admitted,” 
and on January 11, 1841, in latitude 71° 15’ S., he sighted, 
1 Ross, Voyage to the Southern Seas, vol. i. p. 117+ 
