INTRODUCTION 



Pole. On his return he brought back to Europe the first 

 specimen of the Weddell seal to be seen by any naturalist. 



Enderby Brothers, a firm of London shipowners doing 

 a large trade in seal oil, took a keen interest in the dis- 

 covery, and one of the brothers was an original Fellow 

 of the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830. In 

 that very year the firm despatched John Biscoe, a retired 

 Master in the Royal Navy, in the brig Zula, with the 

 cutter Lively in company, on a two years' voyage, com- 

 bining exploration with sealing. Biscoe was a man of 

 the type of Cook and Weddell, a first-class navigator, in- 

 different to comfort, ignorant of fear and keen on ex- 

 ploring the Ear South. In January 1831 he commenced 

 a circumnavigation of the Antarctic Regions eastward 

 from the South Atlantic in 60° South. At the meridian 

 of Greenwich he got south of the Circle and pushed on, 

 beating against contrary winds close to the impenetrable 

 pack which blocked advance to the south. At the end of 

 February he sighted a coast-line in 49° 18' East and 

 about 66° South which has since been called Enderby 

 Land, but it has never been revisited. He searched in 

 vain for the Nimrod Islands, which had been reported in 

 56° South, 158° West, and then crossing the Pacific 

 Ocean well south of the sixtieth parallel he, ignorant of 

 Bellingshausen's voyage, entered Bellingshausen Sea, and 

 discovered the Biscoe Islands and the coast of Graham 

 Land. On his return in 1833 Biscoe received the second 

 gold medal awarded by the Royal Geographical Society 

 for his discoveries and for his pertinacity in sailing for 

 nearly fifty degrees of longitude south of the Antarctic 

 Circle. 



In 1838 the Enderbys sent out John Balleny in the 

 sealing schooner Eliza Scott, 154 tons, with the cutter 

 Sabrina, 54 tons, and he left Campbell Island, south of 

 New Zealand, on January 17, 1839, to look for new land 



XXV 



