Lemaire Channel. Wandel Island.] [Illustration: Cape Cloos.] After a stay of seven days, which was our first camping experience in the antarctic, and the first in the history of south polar exploration, we gladly betook ourselves to the good old bark, which had returned from a cruise southward. During our absence the _Belgica_, under Lecointe’s direction, had been on an exploring cruise to the south. The effort was brilliantly successful, for Lecointe reported the discovery of several islands, upon one of which Racovitza had discovered the metropolis of Belgica Strait, a city of forty thousand penguins, and beyond these islands there was what promised to be an unobstructed highway into the Pacific. To examine this and the extension of the waters before us was our next mission; but Lecointe was not yet satisfied that the wide bay opposite our encampment (Wilhelmina Bay), did not extend through Dancoland to the Atlantic. During the night of February 6th we steamed across the Strait, and early on the following morning we were off Cape Murray. Keeping close to the shores we followed the great wall of ice which lined the shore-line from Cape Murray to Cape Reclus. At noon we rounded Cape Reclus, a long tongue of land-ice with a saddle-shaped mountain in the center, and entered a canal-like body of water, with the high ice-walls of Dancoland on the east and the shore lines of Nansen and Brooklyn Islands on the west. This was certainly a fairy-like scene; but a heavy fog settled down over us, blocking out, for a time, the savage peaks which pierced the heavy spread of snow and reared their towering heights far into the dull skies. In this fog the water had the colour and the glimmer of polished silver, while the walls of ice rising from the shore-lines stood out in great lines of ultramarine blue. We continued our search along the mainland, and in the evening we found ourselves opposite Sophie Rocks, which we had seen from the other side. The body of water through which we sailed on this day has been given the name “Chenal de la Plata,” in honour of the capital of the Argentine Republic. A scene which I photographed at midnight on February 7th pictures this land in a faithful manner. The sun was just under the land-ice, painting the sky in orange and the land in gold, while gliding northward behind a great crested peak 4,000 feet in height. To each side of this black peak were rugged edges of stratified rocks which had once been under the sea, but were now raised to an elevation of two thousand feet, and buried under a sheet of ice of more than a thousand feet in thickness. [Illustration: Ascending Icy Mountains.] [Illustration: An Encampment.]