no SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
Louis Philippe Land and Joinville Land, but if so, its 
longitude was wrong by io°. Although a new ship sev- 
eral years later was built for this adventurous skipper 
and named the Antarctic , he never seems to have gone 
towards the ice with her, and we leave Captain Benjamin 
Morrell, Jr., with his reflections at the farthest south. 
“ I regret extremely that circumstances would not per- 
mit me to proceed farther south, when I was in lat. 
70° 14' S., on Friday, the 14th day of March, 1823, as 
I should then have been able, without the least doubt, to 
penetrate as far as the eighty-fifth degree of south lati- 
tude. But situated as I then was, without fuel, and with 
not sufficient water to last twenty days, — destitute of the 
various nautical and mathematical instruments requisite 
for such an enterprise, and without the aid of such 
scientific gentlemen as discovery ships should always be 
supplied with; taking all these things into consideration, 
I felt myself compelled to abandon, for the present, the 
glorious attempt to make a bold advance directly to the 
South Pole. The way was open before me, clear and 
unobstructed ; the temperature of the air and water mild ; 
the weather pleasant; the wind fair. . . . The anguish 
of my regret, however, was much alleviated by the hope 
that on my return to the United States, an appeal to the 
government of my country for countenance and assist- 
ance in this (if successful) magnificent enterprise would 
not be made in vain. To the only free nation on earth 
should belong the glory of exploring a spot of the globe 
which is the ne plus ultra of latitude, where all the de- 
grees of longitude are merged into a single point, and 
where the sun appears to revolve in a horizontal circle. 
But this splendid hope has since been lost in the gloom 
of disappointment! The vassals of some petty despot 
