50 THE ANTAECTIC VOYAGE : PKELBIINAKIES 
navigator, James Clark Eoss, who had shared in no less than 
seven Polar expeditions — namely, the Erehus, a bomb of 
378 tons, ' of strong build and capacious hold,' especially 
strengthened to bear the pressure and shocks of the ice, and 
the Terror, 340 tons, which had been similarly strengthened 
for Arctic service in the winter of 1836, when many whalers 
were reported beset by the ice in Baffin's Bay, and which had 
been employed the following summer by Sir George Back 
in his attempt to reach Eepulse Bay. * They possessed every 
superiority,' writes Hooker, ' except that of sailing quahcies 
for manoeuvring amongst ice.' So well fomid were the ships 
that they suffered no vital injury from storm or colhsion, or 
from frenzied battering by the masses of pack ice in the long- 
drawn fury of the Antarctic gales : nor, thanks to the precau- 
tions taken, did the crevv^s suffer from the dreaded scurvy 
which cut short the rival cruise of the Astrolabe and ZeUe 
under D'Urville.^ 
Eoss w^as instructed to land the observers and instruments 
for fixed magnetic observatories at St. Helena, the Cape, and 
Van Diemen's Land, finally calhng at Sydney, the centre of 
reference for magnetic determinations. He carried with him 
portable observatories, and with these he was to make special 
observations at intermediate oceanic islands (Kerguelen's 
Land being particularly recommended) simultaneously with 
the fixed observatories and those in Europe. 
Then, after refitting at Van Diemen's Land, he was to begin 
his southward explorations, first to determine the Magnetic 
Pole, and incidentally to extend geographical discovery, ' while 
seeking fresh places on which to plant your observatory in all 
directions from the Pole.' 
The Antarctic afforded more of ' those yet mivisited tracts 
of geographical research ' than the Arctic. It had been visited 
1 Dumont D'Urville (1790-1842), the French navigator and accomplished 
man of science, -whose first claim to fame was the identification and preserva- 
tion of the Venus of Milo. His exploring voj'age in search of La Perouse, 
1826-9, took him to Australasia and the Pacific ; in 1837-40, again in the 
Astrolabe, Avith the Zelee as tender, he made tAvo voyages to the Antarctic, 
Compelled by scurvy to refit at Hobart, he started in January 1840, as Wilkes 
six weeks before from Sydney, in the very direction in which it was knoAMi 
that Ross was about to sail. 
