ANTARCTIC EXPLORERS 51 
by fewer navigators, and the conditions were less favourable. 
Cook in 1774, then Bellinghausen the Russian, Weddell with 
his furthest south of 74°, and Biscoe and Balleny, Messrs. 
Enderby's sealing captains, all between 1820 and 1839 had 
passed the Antarctic Circle. Balleny was the immediate 
predecessor of the French, the American, and the British 
expeditions in 1840 and the following years. After the lapse 
of seventy-three years the soundness of his observations has 
received striking confirmation. In the course of his voyage 
he obviously saw the ice wall of Cote Clairee, ' discovered ' 
the following year by D'Urville. This, however, he took for 
an enormous iceberg, and ultimately decided that what seemed 
to be land behind it was probably a distant fog bank hanging 
over the ice. Early in 1912 the Aurora, belonging to the 
Mawson expedition, sailed over the position of the supposed land. 
This C6te Clairee was a sore point for the French and 
American expeditions, for Lieutenant Wilkes ^ of the United 
States Navy ' discovered ' it independently a week after 
D'Urville, and a great contention for priority ensued. With 
all Ross's admiration for the courage and endurance of both, 
the reader divines in his plain words a touch of national pride 
as he records at full length Balleny's superior claim, if land 
there was, to either : more than this, he must have dimly felt 
a kind of poetic justice in the event. For although he had 
been on a friendly footing with Wilkes, in the outfit of whose 
expedition he had taken much interest, and who later sent him 
privately a chart of his discoveries before the Erebus BSiihd South 
from Tasmania, he was somewhat nettled on reaching that island 
in 1840 to find that both the French and American expeditions, 
knowing his plans, had endeavoured to forestall them ; and he 
writes (' Voyage ' i. 116) that this ' certainly did greatly surprise 
me. I should have expected their national pride would have 
caused them rather to have chosen any other path in the wide 
field before them than one thus pointed out, if no higher con- 
siderations had power to prevent such an interference.' 
1 Lieutenant Charles Wilkes commanded the Vincennes and its four con- 
sorts on the Antarctic exploring expedition sent out by the United States 
Government in 1838-40. 
