48 THE OCEAN WORLD, 
These icy cliffs present a face more or less disintegrated as they 
approach to the rocky shore. The blocks of ice form at first huge 
prisms, or tabular regular masses ; but they get broken up by degrees, 
and rounded off and separated under the action of the waves, which 
chafe them, and their colour becomes more and more limpid and 
bluish. They ascend freely towards the north, often in spite of the 
winds and currents which tend to carry them in the contrary direction. 
One year with another these floating icebergs accumulate with very 
striking differences, and it is only by a rare chance that they open up 
a free passage such as Captain Weddell had discovered. These 
floating islands of ice have been met with in 35° south latitude, and 
even as high as Cape Horn. 
The two French ships frequently found themselves shut up in the 
icebergs, which continued to press upon them while driven before 
the north winds, then the south wind would again disperse their vast 
masses, enabling the ships to issue from their prison all safe and 
sound. In some cases D’Urville found it necessary to force his ships 
through fields of ice by which he was surrounded and imprisoned, 
and to cut his way by force through the accumulating blocks, using 
the corvette as a sort of battering ram. In 1838 he recognised, about 
fifty leagues from the South Orkney Isles, a coast, to which he gave 
the name of Louis Philippe’s and Joinvill’s Land. ‘This coast is 
covered with enormous masses of ice, which seemed to rise to the 
height of 2,600 feet. The crew of D’Urville’s ship being sickly and 
overworked, he returned to the port of Chili, whence he again issued 
for the South Pole in the following January. 
On this occasion his approach was made from a point diame- 
trically opposite to his former attempt. He very soon found himself 
in the middle of the ice. He discovered within the Antarctic Circle 
land, to which he gave the name of Adelia’s Land. The long and 
lofty cliffs of this island or continent he describes as being surtounded 
by a belt of islands of ice at once numerous and threatening. D’Urville 
did not hesitate to navigate his corvettes through the middle of the 
band of enormous icebergs which seemed to guard the Pole and 
forbid his approach to it. For some time his vessels were so 
surrounded that they had reason to fear, from moment to moment, 
some terrible shock, some irreparable disaster. In addition to this, 
the sea produces around these floating icebergs, eddies, which were 
not unlikely to draw on the ship to the destruction with which it was 
threatened at every instant. It was in passing at their base that 
D’Urville was able to judge of the height of these icy cliffs. “The 
walls of these blocks of ice,” he says, ‘‘ far exceeded our masts and 
