circular mass of land with the South Pole at its centre, and its coasts
more or less equidistant from this point.

Two exceptions only to this had been found. Cook and Bellingshausen had
indicated a dip towards the Pole south of the Pacific; Weddell a still
more pronounced dip to the south of the Atlantic, having sailed to a
latitude of 74° 15´ S. in longitude 34° 16´ W.

Had there been a Tetrahedronal Theory in those days, some one might have
suggested the probability of a third indentation beneath the Indian
Ocean, probably to be laughed at for his pains. When James Clark Ross
started from England in 1839 there was no particular reason for him to
suppose that the Antarctic coast-line in the region of the magnetic Pole,
which he was to try to reach, did not continue to follow the Antarctic
Circle.

Ross left England in September 1839 under instructions from the
Admiralty. He had under his command two of Her Majesty's sailing ships,
the Erebus, 370 tons, and the Terror, 340 tons. Arriving in Hobart,
Tasmania, in August 1840, he was met by news of discoveries made during
the previous summer by the French Expedition under Dumont D'Urville and
the United States Expedition under Charles Wilkes. The former had coasted
along Adélie Land, and for sixty miles of ice cliff to the west of it. He
brought back an egg now at Drayton which Scott's Discovery Expedition
definitely proved to be that of an Emperor penguin.

All these discoveries were somewhere about the latitude of the Antarctic
Circle (66° 32´ S.) and roughly in that part of the world which lies to
the south of Australia. Ross, "impressed with the feeling that England
had ever _led_ the way of discovery in the southern as well as in the