33o FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC 
miles. We can just make it out — a land entirely covered 
with snow, faintly yellow in the sunlight, with the clouds 
lying low, hiding its profile outlines. A large black 
mass, like a great cliff with a white sheet of snow down 
its middle, is the only feature. 
There is very little ice about, only small streams at con- 
siderable distances apart, and a few low icebergs twenty or 
thirty feet above water. On the streams are numbers of 
black seals lying singly and in couples, owing their safety 
to the want of space in our tanks for their blubber. They 
have fully twice as much fat on their skins now as those 
we found when we first came. Nature in her infinite 
wisdom has thus provided them with a thick, warm 
covering to enable them to withstand the rigour of the 
approaching winter ; and in her simple, blundering way 
she has given us the same sort of coats, and we do not 
feel particularly grateful — we have the tropics before us. 
Circumstances were against the crew being treated in the 
same way, so they are perhaps in better trim for hot 
weather than we are aft the mainmast; they have had 
abundant work and a poor diet, but we in the cabin have 
had the work plus unlimited penguin stew, — the natural 
food of the country, and the most suitable, I suppose, for 
a permanent resident. 
The doctor found an opportunity of making some 
scientific research this afternoon. He brought out the 
empty greybeards and soda-water bottles that we brought 
from Dundee, which were so tantalising in the tropics, 
and we fastened lines to them and fished for Antarctic 
water over the stern. We (the reader and I), being of 
