340 SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
powerful maritime State of the German Confederation. 
Failing in this, he gave a series of lectures in Ham- 
burg on Maury’s theories of the ocean and on the recent 
improvements in the science of navigation; and since 
he could find no other way of gratifying his craving to 
see the southern hemisphere, he shipped as a common 
sailor and landed at Port Jackson in Australia in 
1852. Pie spent two years in the Australian Colonies, 
part of the time as a gold digger at Bendigo, and, when 
the digging was unfortunate, as a lecturer on naviga- 
tion in a tent to audiences of sailors disappointed in the 
quest of gold. In 1854 he returned to Europe on a sail- 
ing ship with a mutinous crew, and he came back re- 
solved to leave no stone unturned to get up a voyage of 
scientific exploration toward the South Pole, or a jour- 
ney into the then unknown interior of Australia. 
Neumayer was fortunate in making the acquaint- 
ance of Alexander von Plumboldt, the chief mover as we 
have seen, in the revival of Antarctic exploration twenty 
years previously, and he also met Dove, the meteorologist, 
and the great chemist, Liebig. King Maximilian II of 
Bavaria, an enlightened patron of science, who con- 
sulted Liebig as his chief scientific counsellor, considered 
a memorial drawn up by Neumayer on the important re- 
sults bearing on Antarctic research which would accrue 
from the study of terrestrial magnetism at Melbourne, 
and granted the funds for establishing the well-known 
Flagstaff Observatory. I11 August, 1856, before leaving 
for Melbourne to take up this work, Neumayer laid his 
plans for a physical observatory before the British As- 
sociation at Cheltenham, and received the approval of 
Whewell, Airy and Faraday. 
While carrying on the magnetic and meteorological 
