INTRODUCTION 



fortune smiled without interruption on the expedition; 

 his second summer brought trouble and danger with but 

 a trifling increase in knowledge, while the third led only 

 to disappointment. Ross had come triumphantly through 

 a time of unparalleled stress, his personal initiative 

 animated the whole expedition and never were honours 

 more nobly won than those which he received on his 

 return. He was knighted, feted, and presented with 

 many gold medals; and he was offered and begged in 

 the most flattering way to accept the command of the 

 expedition to explore the North- West Passage in his old 

 ships. The position, when he declined it, was given to Sir 

 John Franklin. 



Immediately after Ross' return a supplementary cruise 

 for magnetic observations was carried out by Lieutenant 

 T. E. L. Moore, R.N., who had been mate on the Terror. 

 He sailed from Capetown in the hired barque Pagoda, 360 

 tons, on January 9, 1845, and, after the usual fruitless 

 search for Bouvet Island, crossed the Antarctic Circle in 

 30° 45' East, but was stopped by the ice in 67° 50' South. 

 He struggled hard against calms and head winds to reach 

 Enderby Land, but in vain. Moore believed that he saw 

 land in 64° and about 50° East; but like Ross he stood 

 on a pedantic technicality " there was no doubt about it, 

 but we would not say it was land without having really 

 landed on it." How much controversy and ill-feeling 

 would have been avoided if Wilkes and other explorers 

 had acted on this principle! 



In 1850, in one of the Enderby's ships, the Brisk, 

 Captain Tapsell went to the Balleny Islands looking 

 for seals and sailed westward at a higher latitude than 

 Wilkes had reached, as far as the meridian of 143° East, 

 without sighting land; the log of the voyage is lost, and 

 the exact route is not on record. 



Though Ross urged the value of the southern whale 



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