THE VOYAGE OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS:* THE Borchgrevink Expedition wintered
at Cape Adare, South Victoria Land, the Southern Cross' returning to Australia. Mr. Bernacchi affirms, indeed, that Wood Bay, considerably further south, would be a perfectly safe place bra ship to winter in. There is only one drawback, the possi- bility of the winter ice not breaking up every summer. It must strike the average individual that the incessant storms peculiar to Polar regions constitute another drawback to wintering inside the Arctic Circle. The absence of sunlight is bad enough, weakening the heart and brain as it does, and depressing the spirits, and the wind prevents the taking of satisfactory observations.
Some of the most interesting information collected by the expedition was the meteorological data, from which it appears that a great anti-cyclone covers the South Pole. (We should have said Polar Ice Cap, but of that anon.) On seventy-two days in the year spent at Cape Adare, 170' longitude East, the wind blew from the eiwt-south-east and the south-east at a velocity of forty miles an hour. The Belgian Expedition, wintering between 87° and 95° longitude West, noticed a pre- valence of easterly winds, though their position south of Cape Rom brought them within scope of the westerly winds. The strongest gales, those from the south-east, were the warmest. There must be little doubt now that the theory of a low- pressure area over the South Pole, caused by the circumpolar centrifugal whirl, which was supposed to pile the pressure up somewhere about the tropics, must be relegated to the note-books of the curious. The very low summer temperatures of the Antarctic offer an extraordinary contrast to those observed in
2_10 the South Poinritegionsi Expedition of 18981900. By Louis Bernacchi, 1.#.11,13.: Illustrated. - London; Hurst and Inaekett. [12s.) the Arctic; indeed,- there is no comparison between them. Places as far north as 82r of latitude have a mean summer temperature above freezing, whereas in Victoria Land, in a latitude of from 60° to 65° South, the thermometer cannot rise to freezing point. No wonder there are no Eskimo in the Antarctic regions! For at a latitude in Northern regions wherein he would be as jolly as a sandboy, were he in the Southern Hemisphere he would find life unendurable. Yet the winter on the edge of the Antarctic land surface, South Victoria Land, was not cold in proportion, though occasional icy draughts from the interior suggested dreadful possibilities.
We cannot believe, however, that on the• interior of the Ice Barrier any temperatures would be foundlower than those of the interior Greenland Ice Cap,—or the Inland Ice, as Nansen has so fitly called it. Such glimpses of the surface of the Ice Barrier as they got promised excellent sleighing, and some day the dash will be made. It is not to be forgotten that this interior gradually rose, and that if it rests upon land and covers some extent of the South Pole, the temperatures in the far interior must be cruel, knowing, as we do, the almost continuous anti-cyclonic conditions of the weather.
The Great Ice Barrier astonished our author, who views it as simply an enormous glacier. Its stupendous size, its presence in the deepest soundings taken by the Southern Cross,' and the fact that it gives birth to the familiar flat. topped iceberg of the Antarctic impressed themselves upon him. "It was the most marvellous sight I had ever seen in my life; no words can adequately describe it," he says. Nevertheless, Mr. Bernacchi would dethrone the Barrier from its very highest place, for he thinks it a great glacier stretching out a tongue of ice into the ocean, five hundred miles long indeed, but perhaps not more than fifty broad. He notes the gradual descent of the surface from west to east, and mentions one or two glaciers which send out a tongue for miles into the sea. Did the ice flow from south to north, he says, it would flow north past Cape Crozier, but the Barrier does not reach quite as far north as Cape Crozier. Moreover, the heavy swell from the south in the "farthest south" of the 'Southern Cross' and the quantity of pack ice led Mr. Bernacchi to infer that there may be open water between the Barrier and the cir- cumpolar land, the shallow sounding at their landing-place on the Ice Barrier notwithstanding ; the pack ice, in his view, rounding the extremity of the Ice Barrier and drifting in the customary direction,—north-west.. The soundings are puzzling; they seem to point to a circumpolar archipelago, which would satisfy most theories perhaps. Probably it is of very irregular extent, and merges into land.
There is nothing unreasonable in Mr. Bernacchi's supposi- tion, for, vast as is the Great Barrier, there are mountain ranges lofty and long enough at the Pole, and space large enough, to feed even the Great Ice Barrier. The lofty Parry Range may be only one of many. Let us recollect that the inroads of Antarctic explorers have scarcely penetrated much farther than the seventieth parallel, and that what we do know points to conditions different from those at the North Pole. There the wind, the great currents, the still northing direction of migrating birds, point to a circulation of water; there mast be some open water; whereas the anti-cyclone of the South Pole which seems inevitable from the evidence before us cannot rest on a mingling of open water and land and mountains ; if it does, they are covered—if we may be allowed the Irishism—with an ice-sheet as thick as the laws of pressure will allow on an ice-capped continent.
We spoke of the laws of pressure. These forbid the existence of an ice-sheet of more than sixteen hundred feet. The ice must liquefy. The streams in the heart of glaciers, the pace of the Greenland glaciers, show us how fluid a vast thickness of it becomes. Of course this fact furnishes no guide to the conditions at the South Pole, except that there is no solid block of ice there twenty miles thick. The effect of pressure in liquefying ice is shown in a most extraordinary fashion from an observation made by Mr. Bernacchi in Robertson Bay. He was measuring the height of some imprisoned icebergs averaging a hundred feet above water. The sun was shining on the north face of these bergs, but the southern face was in the shade, and the shade temperature was-15° Fahr., yet there were drops of water oozing out from top to bottom of this face! That they could form inside the ice—the result of pressure—can be understood, but
that they should remain liquid on being released from pressure and coming into contact with such a low temperature offers another puzzle to us. But, indeed, the laws governing ice are not known. In this connection we may observe that the sea never froze to any great thickness at Cape Adare, remaining at from two to five feet from the beginning of May to December, and the temperature of the water below the frozen ice remained constant at 281° Fehr. A continual cir- culation of the sea is one of the most striking facts of Polar conditions. It was obvious from the movements of icebergs in the ice pack, with their relatively enormous sub- marine area, and in open calm weather, when they drifted steadily in one direction. If the sea ice increases at all, it is from fallen snow or from ice attaching itself to the under side.
Life is abundant in the Antarctic in a limited sense; that is to say, it is confined to a few species of birds and animals, and these rarely penetrate the Antarctic Circle. The Weddell seal, which is very abundant, is the exception, having been seen as far south as the Great Barrier. The McCormick's skua and two or three of the petrels were also seen as far south as the Great Barrier. The most characteristic denizen of the Antarctic is the penguin, which keeps to the Antarctic proper. The arrival of the Adelie Land penguins, marching from the north over the ice, was an extraordinary sight. "For fourteen days," says our author, "they came in an absolutely unbroken continuation." The spectacle of these quaint, upstanding birds with their absurdly small wings marching steadily over the ice towards the rookeries at Cape Adare, utterly indifferent to the human being, leaving a blood-stained track on the jagged ice from their lacerated feet, strikes the imagination as not the least among the marvels of instinct. The Adele Land penguin is a comparatively small bird—for a penguin. The Emperor penguin is three and a half feet high, and weighs from fifty to eighty pounds ; the breeding-place of the Emperor penguin has not yet been found. The fascination of watching these curious creatures must be great, for they are fearless of man, and so can be observed under natural conditions.
'When all is said and done, the Antarctic lacks much of the charm of the Arctic. Observant and painstaking as Mr. Bernacchi is, and generally well expressed as his ideas and theories are, he lacks that command of language, that enthu- siasm, which are absolutely necessary in one who would do justice to the Southern ice world. The configuration of the coast visited by the Southern Cross' was not so interesting as that visited by the Belgica,' nor did they see the same abundance of animal life. The Belgica ' Expedition, it will be remembered, brought back valuable evidence as to the exist- ence of an Antarctic continent, a plateau reaching from Victoria Land to Graham Land, and as far west as the Belgians went. The Southern Cross' did not accomplish as much as this. They saw the Great Ice Barrier, and what they saw strengthens all other evidence as to the existence of land. An intermittent ice wall was seen by the Belgians, being simply the fringe of the great ice sheet, the irregularity of the coast, as compared with the shores of Ross Sea, among other reasons, not permitting the same gradual and even wearing away of the ice. Mr. Cook thought the animal life seen by the Belgica ' promised wealth "beyond the dreams of avarice " ; this is certainly not the impression conveyed by Mr. Bernacchi. The former saw no reason why Eskimo should not lead a happier life in Antarctic regions than in Arctic. Here again there is a difference of opinion.
But let us repeat that the Antarctic is gloomy and depress- ing compared with the Arctic,—there is no strange primitive human life, and but a very local distribution of animal life. The very icebergs, impressive as they are, have too much of a family likeness, and the scenery by all accounts has a deadly desolateness and a horrible similarity to what we know of lunar landscapes in the lunar night that is appalling. The uncertainty as to the extent of the Antarctic land, and the real nature of the ice cap and the great glacier which presents such an imposing wall to the navigator, are the two features which endow the South Pole with interest. And even these points are already settling down into a certainty with the circumstantial evidence accumulated in the last our years.
Previous page
