THE HEART OF THE 



ANTARCTIC 



Our consort steamed round us, all hands on both ships 

 cheering, then her bows were set north and she vanished 

 into a grey, snowy mist, homeward bound. We spent 

 a long afternoon struggling to get on board the one 

 hundred and forty fathoms of cable and thirty fathoms 

 of wire that were hanging from our bows. The windlass 

 was worked by means of levers, and all hands were 

 divided into two parties, one section manning the port 

 levers, the other the starboard. All that afternoon, and 

 up to seven o'clock in the evening, they unremittingly 

 toiled at getting the cable in link by link. At last 

 we were able to proceed, the ship's head was put due 

 south, and we prepared to work our way through the 

 floating belt of pack that guards the approach to the 

 Ross Sea. The weather had cleared, and we passed 

 the ice which we had seen in the morning. It was a 

 fairly loose patch of what appeared to be thick land 

 ice. We gradually made our way through similar 

 streams of ice and small hummocky bergs, most of them 

 between forty and fifty feet in height, but a few reaching 

 a hundred feet. 



By 2 a.m. on the morning of January 16, the bergs 

 were much more numerous; perhaps they could hardly 

 be classed as bergs, for their average height was only 

 about twenty feet, and I am of opinion, from what I 

 saw later, that this ice originally formed part of an ice- 

 foot from some coast line. None of the ice that we passed 

 through at this time had the slightest resemblance to 

 ordinary pack-ice. About 3 a.m., we entered an area 

 of tabular bergs, varying from eighty to one hundred and 

 fifty feet in height, and all the morning we steamed in 

 beautiful weather with a light northerly wind, through 

 the lanes and streets of a wonderful snowy Venice. 

 Tongue and pen fail in attempting to describe the magic 



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