458 THE ANTARCTIC MANUAL. 
The American brig was soon no more than a cable’s length behind 
us, and I thought her captain intended to pass to port of the Astrolabe, 
and to remain a short distance to leeward. Now, since the ship under 
full sail had maintained a great speed compared with our own, and 
would rapidly have passed us, if at that moment she had gone to 
windward, I gave the order to board the main tack in order that the 
Astrolabe might remain longer alongside. This manceuvre was probably 
misunderstood by the Americans, for the brig instantly bore off to the 
south, and went away quickly. Afterwards, the reports of Captain 
Wilkes which reached me, in mentioning this meeting, attributed 
intentions to me which were very far from my thoughts. Certainly, if 
I had not wished to communicate just then with the ship which had 
signalled to me, I should not have delayed so long the boarding the 
tack, to keep off a little from the ice-barrier we had met, as the fog had 
prevented us from seeing the way. We had no object in keeping secret 
the result of our operations, and the discoveries for which we had 
nearly paid so heavily. Besides, these are no longer the days when 
navigators, impelled by the interests of commerce, think themselves 
obliged to hide carefully their route and their discoveries in order to 
avoid the concurrence of rival nations. On the contrary, I should have 
been vlad to give to our co-explorers the result of our researches, in the 
hope that it would have been useful to them, and enlarge the circle of 
our geographical knowledge. If I can believe what was told me in 
Hobart Town, it seems that the Americans were far from sharing these 
feelings. They have always maintained the greatest secrecy concerning 
their operations at all the points where they landed, and they have 
refrained from giving the slightest indication of the work which they 
accomplished. 
Jan. 30.—The snow, which had fallen ceaselessly and heavily the 
evening before, stopped during the night. The morning of the 30th 
opened under brighter auspices. The wind was still in the east, and the 
sea rough, with a swell; but the horizon had become much clearer; at 
6 o’clock the man on the look-out had sighted the ice-pack to the south, 
and I brought the ship to the wind in order to go nearer to explore it; 
at 10 o’clock we were not more than three or four miles distant. It 
appeared prodigious. We saw a cliff with a uniform height of 100 to 
150 feet, forming a long line westwards. At several points narrow slits 
seemed to separate ice-islands from the great mass; if these slits 
extended sufficiently far down to entirely isolate the icebergs (glaces) 
we saw, they were larger than anything we had ever seen among floating 
ice. From afar, we saw very well-marked capes and indentations; but 
all these irregularities were always terminated towards the sea by a 
straight vertical wall, covered at its base by smaller pieces of ice (glagons). 
These fragments, resulting from the continual beating of the sea on 
these masses of ice, prove how little effect the waves have on this 
