THE ROMANCE OF ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION.* THE study of geography nowadays
is a severe and precise- business. It has almost become an exact science, and has, nearly severed its world-old connection with romance. There are very few corners of the earth but are set down accurately in maps and described in gazetteers, and accessible by through tickets to be had from any tourist agency. The Victoria Falls are little further off than Niagara, and it is scarcely more arduous or expensive to shoot markhor in Nepal than it was a century ago to go deer-stalking in Sutherland. It was a happy idea to commemorate the older methods of geographical study before their memory has quite passed away from the earth. This. task promises to be very efficiently performed in the series now being issued under the general title of " The Story of Exploration." It aims at being a modern companion to the reprints of Hakluyt and Purchas in which we have all been reading the adventures of our early explorers. In the sixteenth century Englishmen still lived in a small and circumscribed portion of " that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever' and for ever as we move." The old geography of Ptolemy, which had contented men for more than a thousand home-keeping years, was definitely shattered by the prows of the tiny barques in which Columbus crossed an ocean which had so long been supposed shoreless. The old ingenious maps, in which elephants might indeed take the place of towns, but which left no mysterious outer lands for fancy to roam in, were replaced by the new- fashioned globes which showed more than half the world to be a terra incognita. These globes soon acquired a family resemblance to the horn which Salvation Yeo gave to Amyas Leigh at Bideford, whereon displayed themselves cities and harbours, dragons and elephants, whales which fought with sharks, the plate-ships of Spain, islands with apes and palm trees, each with its tame overwritten, and here and there inscriptions reading, " Here is much gold and silver." There is no more romantic story than that which tells how our gallant sailors and explorers have gradually made their way over the whole of the habitable globe, and have solved its problems and unveiled its mysteries,—too often at the cost of leaving their bones beside a fever-haunted swamp in Africa, or sunk in the all-devouring ocean, or as whitened relics of some cannibal feast. It is this story, which Hakluyt and Purchas began to tell three hundred years ago, and which is still incomplete, that con- stitutes the subject of the series in which Dr. Mill's volume has just appeared. "The Story of Exploration" is intended to form a biographical history of the exploration of the world; and judging from the volumes which we have seen already, we should think that it will be a valuable addition to any library.
Dr. Mill, who is well known as one of our most learned geographers, has chosen a very interesting subject. Polar exploration affords a specially romantic story, by reason of the extreme natural difficulties that have to be overcome by the . adventurer who is hardy enough to penetrate the region of eternal ice. Even to-day, in spite of the ingenious devices and assistance that a century of industrial progress has placed at the disposal of the traveller, the regions immediately sur- rounding the North and South Poles still remain inviolate. Now, as in the days of Tacitus, mankind bolds omne ignotum pro magnifica and the Poles of the earth are sought with an enthusiasm which is out of proportion toatheir attractive- ness. We have very little expectation nowadays of finding anything very surprising at either Pole. ' Even the great Antarctic continent which so long fascinated imaginative writers as the Terra Australis Incognita, whose title Swift borrowed to describe the spiritual hidden world, has yielded its mystery, and Ross's great ice barrier has been overpassed. Scientific authority is no longer lent to the view, held till quite recently, that there may be a vast habitable region with a comparatively mild climate and a fertile soil inhabited by strange races of men and antediluvian monsters within this
* The Siege of the South Pole. By E. H. Mill. .London : Alston Rivers. [7s. 6d. net.] gigantic and fancy-striking wall of ice. Poe's weird concep- tion of the Antarctic regions, in the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is almost commonplace in comparison with the imaginative efforts of some of the earlier geographers. One of these maintained that the earth was a hollow shell, with a system of minor planets circulating inside it, and that the Antarctic region concealed a vast opening into this central cavity. This was an ancient belief, and occasional maps are still seen which represent the ocean as draining through a vast whirlpool into a vast chasm at the South Pole. Perhaps few geographers took this wild conception seriously. But it was the immortal voyages of Captain Cook which disposed of the firmly held belief that the Southern Hemi- sphere contained a vast circumpolar continent. It was on January 17th, 1773, that the Antarctic circle was first crossed by civilised man,—to say, as Dr. Mill does, that it had never before been crossed by any human being is a somewhat too sweeping assumption. Cook sailed over a great part of the area which was occupied in the maps by the hypothetical Antarctic continent, and showed clearly enough that there could be no practical likelihood of finding habitable regions further south. " Should any one possess the resolu- tion and the fortitude," wrote Cook, "to elucidate this point by pushing still further south than I have done, I shall not envy him the fame of his discovery, but I make bold to declare that the world will derive no benefit from it." Cook, however, showed that the Southern Seas afforded a rich harvest to the sealer, who supplied the great demand for oil existing in the days when it was the chief illuminant. It was to English and American sealers that the extension of Cook's discoveries was due. Weddell, the most adventurous of these, reached a more southerly point than was attained by any explorer but Ross during the next seventy years. The later history of the siege of the South Pole, from Ross to Captain Scott, is clearly narrated by Dr. Mill, who concludes by pointing out that "the price of a battleship would conquer all the secrets of the ice," and urges that a serious attempt should be made to reach the South Pole, with the help of automobiles, within the next five years.
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