366 SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
Similar observations were to be made simultaneously at 
all observatories in the south of the southern continents, 
supplemented by a body of French men of science at Cape 
Horn, and of Germans on South Georgia. Lieutenant 
Bove hoped to add another to these stations and to be able 
to observe the transit of Venus of 1882 at some point 
within the Antarctic circle. Italian enthusiasm went far, 
but not far enough to raise sufficient funds, and Lieu- 
tenant Bove rather than not go out at all accepted a post 
under the Argentine government for the exploration of 
Southern Patagonia. On that inhospitable seaboard he 
met with shipwreck, but was saved by the British mission 
ship Allen Gardiner. The circumstance got reported in 
many papers as a disaster to the Italian Antarctic expe- 
dition, and it is referred to here merely in order to free 
Antarctic exploration from the responsibility of causing 
the loss of a vessel which never sailed or was intended to 
sail beyond Cape Horn. 
The rise and failure of one other attempt to renew 
exploration claims attention, for although it did not 
succeed, it helped to arouse the sleeping spirit which 
animated the latest and greatest attempt to wipe off the 
stain of ignorance from the South Polar regions. At the 
meeting of the British Association at Aberdeen in 1885 
a paper was read on the renewal of Antarctic research by 
Admiral Sir Erasmus Ommanney, a veteran officer of the 
Franklin search whose active service at sea dated back 
to the battle of Navarino. He had followed the work 
of Ross with interest, had supported Captain J. E. Davis 
in his plea of 1869, and he lived just long enough to see 
the triumphant return of the Discovery in 1904. The 
result of the paper, which was mainly based on Neu- 
mayer’s work, was the appointment of a strong com- 
