FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC 
219 
wants during the watch ; still, it gives a feeling of civilisa- 
tion that to our degenerate nature is almost welcome in 
this far land. 
The engineers, like their engines, have more of modern 
thought than the whale-killers in the cabin — how we value 
them now, when we cannot see a ship's-length ahead, with 
bergs everywhere, and land anywhere. 
When we are not steaming up to the shelter of a berg, 
or steaming clear of one to leeward, we play dominoes for 
imaginary stakes, and tell yarns, and I learn here, as 
any one may learn by reading Kipling's £ Bolivar/ that there 
is as much of the Romance of the Sea, to use a rather 
pretty term, in the stoke-hole of a Whaler or an ocean 
tramp as in any of the old South Spainers. 
We have been taking soundings, for, by dead reckoning, 
we ought to be in the neighbourhood of the Danger 
Islands, which Sir James Ross discovered in 1842. We 
have no wish to land on them suddenly with this big swell 
running. 
We use Sir William Thomson's (Lord Kelvin) deep- 
sea sounding-line ; and the doctor has managed to have 
Dr. H. R. Mill's deep-sea thermometer attached to it — 
an interesting combination of two scientists' inventions, 
which we feel they would have much pleasure in working 
themselves were they here. 
In fine weather it is somewhat aggravating to hear our 
whaling friends talking big of practical seamen, and of 
' thae scienteefic chaps wha stay at hame and ken naethin' 
aboot the sea ava' ' — ignoring their entire dependence on 
such trifles as the compass, sextant, chronometer, etc. ; and 
