104 SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
of one other amongst their number must be referred to, 
Benjamin Morrell, who in 1832 published a book of his 
voyages resembling in many respects that published by 
Edmund Fanning in the following year, from which we 
have already quoted. Fanning was vague, but Morrell 
was vaguer as to dates and places, and moreover, he was 
intolerably vain and as great a braggart as any hero of 
autobiographical romance. That he did sail to the Ant- 
arctic regions we cannot doubt, for he mentions the 
names of too many men still living at the time of publica- 
tion to leave that matter in question; but the greater 
part of his most entertaining narrative concerns the 
happy isles of the Pacific and the troubled coast of South 
America. The incidents in his book are frequently very 
similar to those recorded by Weddell and other voyagers, 
whose published writings Morrell had seen, but in every 
case they are more remarkable and highly coloured, while 
the sheer absurdity of some of them shows that the 
author is romancing regardless of fact. 
Morrell says he was a wild youth, running away to sea 
in 1812, to be speedily taken by a British man-of-war 
and detained for eight months a prisoner of war at St. 
John’s, Newfoundland, and after liberation back to the 
sea again, his valour no whit abated, though his second 
voyage landed him a prisoner of war on Dartmoor for 
two years. In June, 1821, “ having heard much of the 
South Shetland Islands,” which as we have seen, were 
discovered three years before, though previously he had 
only sailed before the mast, he received the post of first 
mate on the Wasp under Captain Robert Johnson, and 
started on a sealing voyage. Here remarkable adven- 
tures befell him in the way of hairbreadth escapes from 
drowning, from freezing to death in a gale in a small 
