Volume 14 Australasia - dana ward's homepage

60 AUSTRALASIA.buffeted by fierce gales, are too inhospitable to afford a permanont home to man.Here shipwi'ecked mariners have often i^assed an anxious time daily sweeping thehorizon in search of a friendly sail. Whalers have also established more or lesspermanent stations in the neighbourhood of the fishing-grounds. Lying on theocean highway between Great Britain and Australia, in the track of the westerntrade winds, these islands are fortunately well known, and have even beencarefully studied, especially by the naturalists of the Challenger expedition of 1874.All are of volcanic origin, rising above the surface of waters over 1,500 fathomsdeep.Marion, Prince Edavaed, and the Crozets.Marion, so named from the navigator who discovered it in 1771, is the highestof the western group, lying over 720 miles to the south-east of the Cape of GoodHope. It is exclusively of igneous formation, its central cone rising to a heightof over 4,000 feet, and even in summer covered with a snowy mantle down to1,000 feet above sea-level. The periphery of this central cone is studded withsecondary craters presenting the appearance of excrescences on its flanks, whileheaps of red scorise, here and there moss-grown, descend to the water's edge.Prince Edward, so named by Cook, attains an altitude of 2,000 feet. TheCrozets, also discovered by Marion, form an archipelago of several islands, one ofwhich. Possession Island, exceeds 5,000 feet. Hog Island takes its name from theanimals here let loose by an English captain to supply the whalers and shipwreckedcrews ; but Rabbit Island would now be a more appropriate name, for the swinehave been replaced by thousands of coneys, which make their burrows in theheaps of scoria).Kerguelen.Kerguelen, by far the largest of all these groups, was discovered in 1772 bythe French captain whose name it bears, and who again visited it the next year,when he found it to be an island, and not a peninsula of the great southerncontinent sought for by all navigators in the Austral seas. It was again exploredin 1776 by Cook, who proposed to call it Desolation Land, a name which itcertainly merits, to judge from the reports of the whalers, the naturalists of theChallenger expedition, and of those sent the following year from England, America,and the United States to observe the transit of Venus.Kerguelen, which lies near the fiftieth degree of south latitude, and which issurrounded by some three hundred islets, rocks, and reefs of all sizes, wasformerly almost inaccessible to sailing vessels. Nevertheless it offers, especiallyon its cast side, a large number of deep bays, creeks, and islets, affording shelter toships that have succeeded in threading the maze of outer channels and passages.These indentations on the seaboard present the same fjord-like formations asthose observed on the shores of the north polar regions, which were at one timecompletely covered by an ice-cap.I