ANTAKCTIC BOTANY 133 
As spring approached, even the Falklands put on a brighter 
face. The forthcoming visit to Hermite Island offered an 
attractive prospect, despite the fact that, with the equinoctial 
gales coming on, a long and uncomfortable passage might be 
expected. There is at least this consolation : ' We know from 
now long experience, that no sea can hurt such vessels as ours, 
which rise like tubs on the water and tumble about in the 
waves.' 
Already he is beginning to think of the Fuegian Fagi, &c., 
as described in his father's * Journal of Botany ' ; and correct- 
ing Webster's confusions in his account of Captain Foster's ^ 
voyage : 
It is, however, among the Mosses and other Cryptogams 
that I shall hope for novelty in the S. extremity of the 
American Continent. . . . You will not wonder that after 
spending so long a time in the Antarctic regions, I should 
be most anxious to complete the Botany of this desolate 
part of the world, by going even to the Horn, and that any 
new Moss or Lichen from such latitudes appears of infinitely 
more value to me than a new Palm or Rafflesia would to 
you, nor can you well conceive my dehght on finding the 
three curious Halorageous, Portulaceous, and Crassulaceous 
weeds of Kerguelen's Land at the Aucklands, then Camp- 
bell's Island, and again on the Falklands — three curious 
forms of small Natural Orders, as strictly Antarctic as 
Parrya or Sieversia is Arctic. 
Amongst the lower orders I find it takes all my eyes to 
get up a tolerably complete collection, for in such dreary 
^ Henry Foster (1796-1831), navigator and surveyor. His most important 
voyages were with Captain Clavering and Sabine in the Griper, to the coasts 
of Greenland and Norway, after which he was elected to the Royal Society ; 
as astronomer with Parry in his Polar expeditions of 1824-5 and 1827, when 
his astronomical and magnetic observations won him the Cople}^ medal ; and 
from 1828, when he was sent out in command of the Chanticleer to the South 
Seas to determine the ellipticity of the earth by pendulum experiments at 
various places, as well as to make magnetic and other observations. His 
work took him to the South Shetlands, and thence to St. Martin's Cove, behind 
Cape Horn, a spot afterwards visited by Hooker. Here he met Captain King 
in the Adventure, who was surveying the neighbouring islands. He was 
accidentally drowned in the Chagres River just after he had at last succeeded 
in measuring the diSerence in longitude across the Isthmus of Panama by 
means of rockets. The account of the voyage was written from the journal 
of Webster, surgeon of the Chanticleer. 
