The _Challenger_, in its cruise of over three years, naturally visited many oft-described ports and settlements with which we shall have nought to do. After a visit to Kerguelen’s Land—“the Land of Desolation,” as Captain Cook called it—in the Southern Indian Ocean, for the purpose of selecting a spot for the erection of an observatory, from whence the transit of Venus should be later observed, they proceeded to Heard Island, the position of which required determining with more accuracy. They anchored, in the evening, in a bay of this most gloomy and utterly desolate place, where they found half-a-dozen wretched sealers living in two miserable huts near the beach, which were sunk into the ground for warmth and protection against the fierce winds. Their work is to kill and boil down sea-elephants. One of the men had been there for two years, and was going to stay another. They are left on the island every year by the schooners, which go sealing or whaling elsewhere. Some forty men were on the island, unable to communicate with each other by land, as the interior is entirely covered with glacier, like Greenland. They have barrels of salt pork, beef, and a small store of coals, and little else, and are wretchedly paid. “Books,” says Lord Campbell, “tell us that these sea-elephants grow to the length of twenty-four feet; but the sealers did not confirm this at all. One of us tried hard to make the Scotch mate say he had seen one eighteen feet long; but ‘waull, he couldn’t say.’ Sixteen feet? ‘Waull, he couldn’t say.’ Fourteen feet? ‘Waull, yes, yes—something more like that;’ but thirteen feet would seem a fair average size.... One of our fellows bought a clever little clay model of two men killing a sea-elephant, giving for it—he being an extravagant man—one pound and a bottle of rum. This pound was instantly offered to the servants outside in exchange for another bottle.” Crossing the Antarctic Circle, they were soon among the icebergs, keeping a sharp look-out for Termination Land, which has been marked on charts as a good stretch of coast seen by Wilkes, of the American expedition, thirty years before. To make a long story short, Captain Nares, after a careful search, _un-discovered_ this discovery, finding no traces of the land. It was probably a long stretch of ice, or possibly a _mirage_, which phenomenon has deceived many a sailor before. John Ross once thought that he had discovered some grand mountains in the Arctic regions, which he named after the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Croker. Next year Parry sailed over the site of the supposed range; and the “Croker” Mountains became a standing joke against Ross. [Illustration: “THE CHALLENGER” IN ANTARCTIC ICE.]