352 SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
and seal hunting carried on from this outpost of the 
Antarctic had dwindled greatly from what it was when 
Ross paid his visit thirty years before. 
On February ist the Challenger left Kerguelen and four 
days later passed McDonald Island and reached Heard 
Island where Captain Nares landed, accompanied by 
Messrs. Buchanan and Moseley. They were greeted by a 
group of amazed sealers with the words, “ Guess you’re 
out of your reckoning,” for these men could not imagine 
any motive but the search for seals to bring a ship to such 
a remote and uninviting spot of land, and the Challenger 
was obviously no sealer. A dismal enough life the forty 
seal hunters led, housed in huts half excavated in the 
ground so as to be easily covered with snow for warmth 
in winter, and scattered in groups along the coast seldom 
communicating with each other. Part of their work con- 
sisted in watching the landing of the seals and driving 
them back to sea with whips made of sea-leopard skin 
when they tried to come ashore on beaches which could 
not be approached by the schooners on their annual visit. 
The rest consisted in killing the poor beasts when they 
landed at last in places where the skins and blubber could 
be readily shipped. The glaciers creeping from the cen- 
tral mountain cut off the different segments of the island 
from one another and made them very difficult of access. 
The attempt to travel on the beach round the coast was 
even more hazardous than braving the crevasses and the 
fog on the glaciers of the higher slopes. The weather 
was so bad that the Challenger could not survey the 
island, and it remains to this day uncharted save for the 
rough sketches made by the sealers. They, too, have now 
deserted it after killing off the seals, and ships, as we 
have seen, no longer enter upon those seas unless driven. 
