Again, disappointed and discouraged, we tried to turn the bark in an effort to retrace our track. The entire afternoon was devoted to this effort, but we were held with fetters not easily broken. This battle with the ice has been the worst to the present. We go full speed ahead, then full speed astern. Each change in direction is followed by crash after crash, until it seems that every part of the good ship has been loosened. Either the ice or the _Belgica_ must go to pieces. After many hours of hard struggling the _Belgica_ obtains sufficient room to give her a good headway, and then she rushes against and upon the ice in a manner to make her mistress of the situation. Ploughing, and jamming, and crushing her way through the huge masses of ice, she scraped off her new dress of paint, and tore away many pieces of her outer sheathing. Her path was marked by specks of paint and pieces of wood, the result of scratches and bruises, but as she fought her way again out into the open sweep of the new antarctic sea she had the appearance, and we had for her the admiration, of a battleship after a destructive engagement. While the _Belgica_ was engaged battering the ice, Racovitza, Tollefsen, and myself, started out over the ice to study the life and to secure zoölogical specimens, as well as photographs. We saw numbers of penguins, some giant petrels, and a few crab-eating, or white antarctic seals; but the surprise of the day was a lone seal with a thick neck and a big head, altogether different from any variety which we had seen before. We at once recognised it as the “new seal” claimed to have been discovered by Borchgrevink, in 1894. While it agreed in every particular with the descriptions of the adventurous Norwegian sailor, the animal proved, upon minute examination, to be a yearling of the true sea-leopards. Borchgrevink’s discovery then, in this case as in another, which will be cited later, is a myth, for the sea-leopard has been known for about one hundred years.