narrow and winding channels, whose lofty walls had long shut out the land from their view, and found themselves in a comparatively disencumbered space, from whence they could contemplate the coast in all its visible extent. Distant from them, about eight or ten miles, was an immense strip of land, stretching out of sight, and entirely covered with ice and snow which lay heaped up on its summit, marking the ravines on the land-slopes, as well as the bays and points upon the coast. In parts, the ice presented a smooth and uniform covering of a dull and monotonous white; in others, its surface was ploughed, and shattered, and broken, as if it had been subjected to the action of some violent convulsion, or of a sudden and irregular thaw. Numbers of huge ice-hills, recently fallen from the coast, had not yet been borne away, and made the approach to it impossible.
The solid barrier forbade all progress southward; but they now believed themselves near the southern magnetic pole, and that the line of the variation of the needle could not be far off to the westward. The vessel was therefore steered westward, and the corvettes coasted the land at five or six miles' distance. At noon, observations gave 66° 30" of southern latitude. All the compasses in the ship veered in a remarkable manner; and on board the "Astrolabe" the reversed compass in the commander's cabin was the only one which marked the route with precision. They thus knew that the newly-discovered land lay precisely under the Antarctic Polar Circle, since it ran nearly east and west.
At five in the evening the breeze gave way to a calm, of which Captain D'Urville took advantage to despatch
