VICTORIA LAND 
283 
barrier and reached the highest latitude for the trip, 
78° 4' S., they had followed the icy wall, though some- 
times at too great a distance to see it, for a continuous 
length of 250 miles. At that point it was 160 feet high, 
the cliffs of ice rising sheer from the water, and con- 
sidering the depth, it must have been afloat so that the 
total thickness of this sheet of continental ice could not 
have been less than a thousand feet. 
Nearly every day a bottle containing a note of the 
position of the ship was thrown overboard, in the hope 
that they might ultimately be picked up and throw some 
light on the currents of the Southern Ocean. But in 
those days the southern continents were but thinly 
peopled, and it is not altogether surprising that none of 
the messengers from the edge of the ice ever appeared 
again. The days were full of work and anxiety, for the 
cold was becoming severe, the pack-ice was sometimes 
so dense as to imprison the ships in a pond of water in 
which they had little room to manoeuvre, and young ice 
was beginning to form. A bay was observed in the edge 
of the barrier in about 187° E., and here the ice-wall, at 
one point, was only fifty feet high, and for the first time 
it was possible to catch a glimpse of the upper surface. 
The Erebus stood in to within a quarter of a mile of the 
ice-cliffs at 5.40 a. m. on the 9th, Ross stating that he 
could not permit himself to relinquish so favourable an 
opportunity of getting quite close to it. McCormick, 
however, who had spent the whole twenty-four hours 
of continuous daylight on deck, insinuates that the officer 
of the watch, instigated by himself, ran the ship in so 
close that the ice-cliffs took the wind from her sails as 
she tried to go about, and while she hung in stays the 
captain came on deck and rated the lieutenant in charge 
