a year. As
men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so
it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic as
a medium of discomfort. A member of Campbell's party tells me that the
trenches at Ypres were a comparative picnic. But until somebody can
evolve a standard of endurance I am unable to see how it can be done.
Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time
than an Emperor penguin.

Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the
Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying
far beyond the seas which encircled man's habitation, and nothing is more
striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions than its
absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were
navigating the ice-fields of the North; yet when Wellington fought the
battle of Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the
South.

For those who wish to read an account of the history of Antarctic
exploration there is an excellent chapter in Scott's Voyage of the
Discovery and elsewhere. I do not propose to give any general survey of
this kind here, but complaints have been made to me that Scott's Last
Expedition plunges the general reader into a neighbourhood which he is
supposed to know all about, while actually he is lost, having no idea
what the Discovery was, or where Castle Rock or Hut Point stand. For the
better understanding of the references to particular expeditions, to the
lands discovered by them and the traces left by them, which must occur in
this book I give the following brief introduction.

From the earliest days of the making of maps of the Southern Hemisphere
it was supposed that there was a great continent called Terra Australis.
As explorers penetrated round the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, and
found nothing but stormy oceans beyond, and as, later, they discovered
Australia and New Zealand, the belief in this continent weakened, but was
not abandoned. During the latter half of the eighteenth century eagerness
for scientific knowledge was added to the former striving after
individual or State aggrandizement.

Cook, Ross and Scott: these are the aristocrats of the South.

It was the great English navigator James Cook who laid the foundations of
our knowledge. In 1772 he sailed from Deptford in the Resolution, 462
tons, and the Adventure, 336 tons, ships which had been built at