100 THE VOYAGE : PASSING IMPEESSIONS 
We proceeded to Kerguelen's Land, and after twice 
being blown off in a gale we at last, on May 12, anchored 
in Christmas Harbour. During the passage there were 
few sea-animals, so I studied Cape plants with Harvey, 
Endlicher,! and De Candolle.^ 
From a distance the Island looks hke terraces of black 
rocks ; on which the snow hes, causing it to look striped 
in horizontal bands. On the melting of the snow, the flats 
appear covered with green grass and the hills with brown 
and yellow tufts of vegetation. The shores are almost 
everywhere bounded by high, steep precipices, some of 
frightful height, above which the land rises in ledges to the 
tops of the hills. The varied colour in the vegetation gave 
me hopes that the country might be rich in mosses, &c. 
[nor could anything the ingenious Mr. Anderson in ' Cook's 
Voyages ' said persuade me to the contrary. . . . Surely, 
I thought, this cannot be such a land of desolation as Cook 
has painted it, containing only eighteen species of plants]. 
Christmas Harbom' is well described and figured by 
Cook, indeed the accuracy with which he made a running 
survey of the coast is quite marvellous, and shows how 
talented a man he was. I cannot say so much of his 
Surgeon and Botanist, ' The ingenious Mr. Anderson,' as 
our copy calls him. Had Cook been here in winter he would 
have found it a different place to he in from what it is in 
summer ; the winds blow into it from the N. W. with the most 
incredible fmy, preventing sometimes for days any inter- 
course with the shore. We have the chain cables of a 28 
gun-ship, and yet we drove with 3 anchors and 150 fathoms 
of chain on the best-bower, 60 on the small, and a third 
anchor under foot, the Sheet. Such a thing was never heard 
of before ! 
1 Stephen Ladislas Endlicher (1804-49), a Hungarian, Professor of Botany 
in Vienna from 1840, and author of a Genera Plantarum. 
2 Augustin Pyrame De CandoUe (1778-1841), a Genevese whose most 
important work was done in France between 1796 and 1816, when he returned 
to Geneva. He used his immense knowledge of botany to become the leading 
systematist of his period. (For the adoption of his system by Bentham and 
Hooker in the Gen. PL, see ii. 19 seq., 22, 415. ) Beginnmg to work out his great 
system on too large a scale (1818-21) he continued it in the more manageable 
Prodromus Systematis Natumlis Regni Vegetabilis, in seventeen volumes, 1824-73, 
ten of which were the work of his son and successor, Alphonse, The latter, like 
Hooker, was strongly interested in distribution and economic botany, writing 
a Geographie Botaniqua in 1855 and Origine dcs Plantes Cultivees in 1883. 
