Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
17
feet in thickness, crushes the undulations of the waves, and disregards their violence: it
is a mighty and wonderful object, far beyond any thing we could have thought or con-
ceived.” As the season drew to an end, snow squalls and heavy pack were joined by freshly
forming sea ice. On February 9, just as Ross was deciding to turn back, he saw a small
bay opening in the Barrier to the south, and so struck for it. At this low point the men
could see through for the first time onto the flat, featureless expanse behind the wall.
Fresh, pancake-shaped floes of ice were freezing all around the ships, so the expedition
retreated.
The ships retraced their path to Franklin Island and proceeded westward in an at-
tempt to reach land. The view to the south was one of continuous high ground connect-
ing Mount Erebus with the mountains to the west. The expedition named this broad
reentrant in the ice front McMurdo Bay, after the senior lieutenant on the Terror. The
ships were able to push west to within ten or twelve miles of the coast, but a tight pack
stopped their forward progress. OV to the northwest a point of land suggested a possible
winter haven. Two hours of hard pushing closed no distance on this cape, so after con-
sulting with Commander Francis Crozier, captain of the Terror, Ross decided to abandon
the quest. They had found no safe harbors anywhere along coastal Victoria Land from
which a land assault could be staged the following spring. They made a final landing at-
tempt on February 21 at Cape Adare, but a solid pack held them oV about eight miles, so
they set a course to the northwest along the further coast. For more than one hundred
miles they charted a series of capes with relatively low mountains behind them. The west-
ernmost promontory shielded a small bay full of small icebergs (Fig. 1.9). Ross named it
Cape North, because it appeared that beyond it the coast dropped back to the south of
Figure 1.9. Icebergs that
calved the previous season
clog the ice-bound bay at
Cape North. This was the
westernmost point of land
sighted by Ross on the
return leg of his voyage of
discovery in 1840-1841.
