Chapter VII: Marvels of the Antarctic

We find our Expedition to South Polar regions now cut up into four divisions, though I know, as if by instinct, that the hearts of my readers are in the highlands of the far interior with my chief heroes.

We are at liberty to have a look, however, at the doings of the ships themselves, just for a minute or two, before wrapping our furs still closer around us, and returning to Ingomar and Curtis, or our people in camp.

It must not be thought, therefore, that the officers of the _Walrus_ and _Sea Elephant_ were otherwise than busy.

While the weather was still open, therefore, and the sea and shores free, in a measure, from ice, Captain Mayne Brace came out of his creek, or harbour, and commenced a scientific voyage once more along the shores of Victoria Land; while Captain Bell, with Milton, the old mate of the _Walrus_, was first to explore Ross’s sea to the south and east, and afterwards make the best of his way to New Zealand, taking with him the few invalids there were, and the letters. He was to return with extra provisions, extra stores, and more coals.

Of coals there could not be too much. Coals mean heat and power, and therefore life itself.

His reappearance in Bell’s Sound, as the well-sheltered little creek, which the _Walrus_ had chosen as her Antarctic home, had been named, would be awaited with a very great deal of anxiety indeed.

THE MARVELS OF THE ANTARCTIC.

Boys of an inquiring turn of mind will read the following brief notes with interest, I feel certain. And I rejoice to say that, among my hundreds of thousands of young British readers, there is a very large number who prefer the solid and lasting to the romantic and ephemeral. We all love heroes, and delight in their deeds of derring-do, but we all want to know a little about the world we live in.

I must refer you to books for the history and adventures of the chief heroes of the Antarctic. Sir James Clark Ross, who sailed about in these regions as far back as 1840 and forward, was certainly a hero in every sense of the word, and considering that he had neither proper instruments for scientific observation, nor steam-power, his brave deeds and discoveries are truly marvellous. The great Ross sea to the East of Victoria Land is named after him, is a monument indeed, which while the world lasts can never be destroyed, to British pluck and endurance. His was, however, a voyage of research with the view of finding out the Magnetic Pole, which, no schoolboy need be reminded, is different from the true axis of the earth--the centre line from south to north round which the world revolves, as does a wheel upon its axle.

Do I make this sufficiently clear to you? The axis or axle poles are the rotation poles, but the magnetic poles do not, as I said, coincide. This world itself, therefore, is just a gigantic spherical magnet. At these poles the dipping-needle stands vertical. The discovery of these poles, of course, enables us to correct our navigation charts, but as the magnetic forces are not constant, the more closely they are studied the better.

Enough of that, which is a long and, I fear, a dry subject.

Mount Erebus and Mount Terror lie at the southernmost and westernmost end of Ross’s great sea. They are still active volcanoes, standing over twelve and ten thousand feet respectively above the sea’s level.

Along the base of Ross’s sea runs a gigantic barrier of ice, hundreds of feet high, which seems to tell the pigmy man that thus far may he come, but no further. Within the next hundred years, however, that pigmy means to wrench most of its secrets from Nature.

We all owe much to the cruise of the gallant _Belgica_, in 1898-1900; she reached a southern latitude of about 78° or over.

It is far more easy to reach to high latitudes in the north owing to the comparative mildness of the climate.

The southern summer is shorter and colder than that at the North Pole.

Well, we know a little about the whereabouts of the Magnetic Pole, but the vast interior is still a sealed book.

The climatology of the Antarctic is marvellous, and very puzzling. During the summer, for example, in which we now find our _Walrus_ friends sailing about, the days were often very mild, down along the coast, with its bare brown, black, and yellow earth peeping through the snow, its occasional avalanches of snow, and its sudden transitions from sunshine and warmth to snow-fogs, snow-squalls, and a temperature running down to zero, or below it.

The winds are, to a great extent, accountable for this.

But from the very start of the sledge expedition, or as soon as they got high up on the great tableland of snow, there was little really mild weather, and, despite the sunshine, the surface seldom, if ever, got soft.

The currents are another marvellous study; that is, if they can be studied, which they never can be until stations of observation are established all round the so-called Antarctic continent.

The volcanoes are numerous. As I said before, in these regions the great war between the ice above and the fire beneath the earth’s crust is still going on, and will doubtless go on for millions of years, unless this globe of ours comes into collision with some invisible wandering world--then the heat evolved will melt the two, and creation, as far as these are concerned, will have to commence all over again.

But other marvels have yet to be revealed to us. We want to know something of the buried earth’s crust in these Antarctic regions. We want to find out if possible what species of plants and flowers grew here when the equatorial belt was an uncrossable band of flaming heat; we would like to know something of its buried forests, and even of the extinct animals that roamed therein, in the shape perhaps of dragons fifty to a hundred feet long which inhabited its lakes and its caves on mountain slopes.

There were such creatures, doubtless, at a time long long agone, when this world was almost entirely peopled by monsters which are now relegated, too thoughtlessly, to the realms of the mythological.

Have I given you some food for thought, lads?

If I have, I am exceedingly glad, and so I close this short chapter at once.