Historically the record of our predecessors in the region which we are about to enter is short. Early in the twenties the islands about Cape Horn and the South Shetlands were besieged by American fur sealers. They did their work of execution so thoroughly that in the short period of five years almost the entire race of fur seals was exterminated. One of these sealers, Captain Nathaniel Palmer, in a little shallop of forty tons, while seeking new sealing grounds southward, found an extensive country covered with ice and inhabited by penguins and seals. Some years later Captain Biscoe, a British sea-elephant hunter, saw a part of the same country somewhat farther to the south-west, and still later a German sealer, Dallman, saw a part of the same northern coast. To Palmer belongs the honour of the discovery of this vast tract of land. It is a disappointment that his records are so imperfect, but the record of everything antarctic is of a similar nature. Palmer has been forgotten by his own countrymen and ignored by foreign cartographers. In the arrangement of the new chart the Belgian Expedition will attempt to place his name where it belongs--on the land which he saw first of all men. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon of the 23d a curious white haze appeared upon the southern sky. A little later an imperfect outline of land rose into this haze. It extended as far as we could see to the east and to the west. The top was everywhere veiled by a high mist, and this mist had within it a mysterious light, which is one of the most startling of all the south polar effects. As we drew nearer we noticed that the land was not as it at first appeared, an endless wall of ice, but rough, irregular and disconnected, though it was buried under a mantle of glacial ice, extending to the water’s edge. Here and there were large bays, and one directly over our bowsprit was so wide that it offered us a tempting path southward. Now the maps were carefully studied that we might be able to fix our position on paper; but in this effort we failed. Over the starboard bow rose two beautiful headlands, mountains of moderate height, perhaps two thousand feet; the first (Mount Pierre) having around it a circular cloak of ice extending from a black crown of rocks at the summit to the sea-line, where it terminated in a perpendicular wall of ice of about one hundred and twenty feet in height. The second (Mount Allo) had a similar form but was much more heavily laden with snow. In front of these remarkable headlands there was a bay, and beyond a long series of mountains, clothed in the same sheet of perennial ice. Eastward there were a number of small islands, mostly free of ice, and beyond, low under the south-eastern sky, was the dim outline of an extensive white country. We set our course somewhat east of south to examine the interruption between the high mountainous land before us and the more even country eastward.