ENDERBY BROTHERS 
147 
merchants by the careful choice of their skippers, who 
were men of some education, and often of naval train- 
ing. These were instructed to pursue discovery with a 
view to the advancement of knowledge as well as to 
pecuniary profit, hence the names of the owners as well 
as that of their skippers must always be honourably asso- 
ciated with the opening up of the dark and icebound 
margin of the South Polar region. 
In 1830, Mr. John Biscoe, a retired Master in the 
Royal Navy, was sent out by the Enderbys on a sealing 
voyage in the brig Tula, with the cutter Lively, com- 
manded at first by Mr. Smith and later by Mr. Avery, in 
company. On voyages of such length and danger 
it was felt that the dispatch of a single ship 
was inexpedient, and experience had shown, as 
in the case of Weddell’s expedition, that a cut- 
ter was a handy and serviceable craft for working 
on the edge of the ice. In the landsman of to-day so 
small a vessel venturing into the remotest and the 
stormiest seas of the world, excites feelings of amaze- 
ment, and we question if there are many in the navy, or 
even in the mercantile marine, who would care to sign 
on for a south polar voyage of two years’ duration, in 
a fifty-tonner. 
Attention had been called to the probability of land 
existing within the Antarctic ice by Captain Horsburgh, 
Hydrographer to the East India Company, who com- 
municated a paper to the Royal Society in 1830, on the 
remarkable distance towards the tropics at which Antarc- 
tic ice was met with in 1828, some bergs having been 
sighted as far north as 35 0 50' S. He argued that land 
must exist somewhere within the Antarctic region be- 
tween the meridian of Greenwich and 20° E., capable of 
