We spent the afternoon surveying this coast, and at 5 o’clock we were off the rounded peak (Mount Allo) which we first saw on the 23d. We then steamed again for the little island (Auguste) upon which we made our first debarkment. Here we rested under steam for the few hours of twilight, during the midnight hours, and on the 26th a number of sights were made for triangulation. The morning of the 27th was spent in a similar way. In the afternoon we steamed south to a number of small rocks (Gaston Islands), which we thought might be the islands laid down by Larsen on the east coast. Larsen claimed to have looked northward from his islands without seeing land, but we found it otherwise. The day was hazy, and, though the ice-wall of the coast was constantly visible, the interior of the country to both sides of us was obscured under clouds. A debarkment was made on one of the supposed Larsen Islands. They were three in number, of irregular shape and in size; the largest was not more than a mile in its longest diameter. The two largest islands had, in the centre, cone-like peaks of bare rocks, from which an ice-mantle spread out to the shore line, as it does on all the antarctic islands. The smallest one upon which we landed was not more than a half mile wide and three quarters of a mile long. There was about it nothing to indicate land except a shelf of volcanic rocks upon which we placed the geologist with his hammer, while the boat withdrew to keep from being dashed to pieces on the rocks. The tide was low, and if Arctowski had been left there, or if our boat had been lost, we should have been forced to climb a vertical cliff of ice one hundred feet high, or take to the rising sea of ice-water, as did the seals and penguins. Neither prospect seemed agreeable, and the danger of falling ice from the cliffs was such that we soon returned to the ship. The haze of the morning thickened to a dense fog, which entirely blocked out our view of the main shore-lines on both sides. We steamed westerly in a line over which the channel seemed to open into a large body of water. The prevailing query on board was, “Is this the Pacific or the Atlantic?”