INTRODUCTION 



On January 26, after being thirty-nine days in the pack, 

 and boring their way for eight hundred miles through 

 it, the Erebus and the Terror were only thirty-nine miles 

 farther south than Cook had been in the Resolution on 

 the same meridian without entering the ice at all sixty- 

 eight years before. On February 2 the ships escaped 

 from the pack in 159° East, but only one degree south 

 of the Antarctic Circle. The Barrier was not sighted 

 until February 22, and on the 28th the ships at last got 

 within a mile and a half of the face of the ice-wall, which 

 was found to be 107 ft. high at its highest point and the 

 water 290 fathoms deep, in 161° 27' West and 78° II' 

 South. This was the highest latitude reached by Ross, 

 3° 55' or 235 miles farther south than Weddell's farthest, 

 and 710 miles from the South Pole. Towards the south- 

 east he saw that the Barrier surface gradually rose with 

 the appearance of mountains of great height, but he could 

 not bring himself to chart this as land, for no sign of 

 bare rock could be seen, and though he felt that " the 

 presence of land there amounts almost to a certainty" 

 he Would not run the risk of any one in the future proving 

 that he had been mistaken, and so charted it as an " ap- 

 pearance of land" only. Any other explorer of that 

 period, or of this, would have called it land and given it 

 a name without hesitation, and had Ross only known how 

 to interpret what the numerous rock specimens he dredged 

 up from the bottom had to tell him, he could have marked 

 the land with an easy mind. 



It was now time to leave the Far South; the work 

 had been infinitely harder than that of the former season 

 and the result was disappointing. The coast of Victoria 

 Land was not sighted on this cruise, and on March 6, 

 1842, the Erebus and Terror crossed the Antarctic Circle 

 northward, after having been sixty-four days within it. 

 Ross Sea was not furrowed by another keel for more 



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