Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ic cruise. He visited Fiji, the Pulau Islands and Borneo, then headed
south once more. In December
Astrolabe
and
Zélée
arrived in Hobart,
Tasmania, ready for another assault on the Antarctic at a point al-
most 1800 from the coast D'Urville had already discovered. On 1
January 1840 the expedition set sail towards 'the country doomed
by nature'. This time D'Urville was able to reach farther south. On 19
January he was, once more, confronted by a land barrier in 66°30′.
Two days later he landed a boatload of men who returned with
samples of earth and rock. This time he was able to explore the
territory he called Adeólie Coast (after his wife) for about two hun-
dred miles. Then, just at the point where the ice cliffs turned sharply
southwards, D'Urville was again obliged by the state of his crews to
abandon his attempt to get closer to the pole than any predecessor
(James Weddell had reached 74°15′ in 1823). He returned home via
Hobart and the Cape, a disappointed man. Yet his had been a brave
and important foray into earth's most inhospitable environment and
he had marked two stretches of coast on the virtually empty charts
of the Antarctic.
In January 1840, while the French were exploring far to the
south of Australia, an American convoy was working in the same
area. The Great United States Exploring Expedition was one of the
most ill-managed scientific ventures that ever set sail. For twenty
years scholars and patriots had been urging the government in
Washington to bestir themselves to stop their nation falling further
and further behind in the march of scientific research. It took per-
sistent argument and lobbying to get a circumnavigation project off
the ground and right up to the moment the ships sailed preparations
were bedevilled by political and naval opposition. As a result, the sci-
entists were ill-equipped for their work and their relationship with
the officers had not been adequately defined. All this would not, per-
haps, have mattered greatly if a competent, wise and sensitive leader
