Cape Crozier

“ The New Year brought better weather with it, and such good progress was made that by mid-day on Tuesday, January 3, the ship reached the Barrier five miles east of Cape Crozier. During the voyage they had often discussed the idea of making their winter station at this Cape, and the prospect had Page 223 seemed to become increasingly fascinating the more they talked of it. ”

“ We had a very good view of Cape North whilst close in with the icy cliffs, and observed that a high wall of ice, of a similar character to that which extends from Cape Crozier, forming the great barrier of 78° 1⁄4 S., and which prevented our further progress to the southward, stretched away to the westward from the Cape, as far as we could see from the mast-head, and probably formed a coast line of considerable extent; a close, compact, impenetrable body of ice occupied the whole space to the northward and westward. ”

“ Low down on the extreme right or east of the land there was a black smudge of rock peeping out from great snow-drifts: that was the Knoll, and close under it were the cliffs of Cape Crozier, the Knoll looking quite low and the cliffs invisible, although they are eight hundred feet high, a sheer precipice falling to the sea.
It is at Cape Crozier that the Barrier edge, which runs for four hundred miles as an ice-cliff up to 200 feet high, meets the land. The Barrier is moving against this land at a rate which is sometimes not much less than a mile in a year. ”

“ Wilson is very busy with pencil and brush.
Atkinson is unpacking and setting up his sterilizers and incubators. Wright is wrestling with the electrical instruments. Evans is busy surveying the Cape and its vicinity. Oates is reorganising the stable, making bigger stalls, &c. Cherry-Garrard is building a stone house for taxidermy and with a view to getting hints for making a shelter at Cape Crozier during the winter. Debenham and Taylor are taking advantage of the last of the light to examine the topography of the peninsula. In fact, everyone is extraordinarily busy. ”

“ Jan. 31.The lines were immediately prepared, and when we got amongst them at 3 a.m. the next morning we hove to, and obtained soundings in two hundred and sixty fathoms, on a bottom of stiff green mud, leaving no doubt on our minds that all the bergs about us, after having broken away from the barrier, had grounded on this curious bank, which being two hundred miles from Cape Crozier, the nearest known land, and about sixty from the edge of the barrier, was of itself a discovery of considerable interest. ”

“ Our lamb, poor innocent, seems to feel lonely under the frown of a coast so inhospitable and savage, and comes bleating around us as if for sympathy. The wind is cold and bracing, sweeping alike the sea and the sky of all fog and clouds, and driving us to heavy winter clothing.
As we bear down toward the Cape, we pass Gull Isle, a mere pile of naked rocks delicately wreathed with lace-like mists. Imagine the last hundred feet of Corway Peak, the very finest of the New Hampshire mountain tops, pricking above the waves, and you will see this little outpost and breakwater of Cape St. ”

“ The impressive scenery and bold picturesqueness all about attract many artists, who haunt the rocks and sea views of Cape Ann. The whole district is full of summer-homes, with flower-gardens and shrubbery amid the rocks and boulders, and the cliffs and ocean presenting an endless variety of changing scenery. The outer extremity of the Cape, long called Halibut Point, has been modernized into the Land's End, thus being rightly named as the termination of the great Massachusetts granite ridge, which falls away sharply into the sea. ”

“ The Cove made a summer voyage to Davis Strait and Baffin's Bay in 1836, and on 10 Jan. 1837 Crozier was promoted to be commander. On 11 May 1839 he was appointed to the Terror, in which he accompanied Captain Ross in his voyage to the Antarctic Ocean, from which they both happily returned in September 1843. Crozier had been during his absence advanced to post rank, 16 Aug. ”

“ Leaving the beach to continue down Cape, you come suddenly upon the strangest scenery of all, where the moors of Wellfleet and Truro swell out of the Bay in fantastic shapes, and merely condescend to allow the old County Road to pass through them—which it does not do easily. The hills have been softly rounded by time and the wind, and they rise sometimes to great heights, only to fall off into sheltered valleys where the scrub pines grow. It is a crazy-quilt of topography and color, nearly smothered by a blanket of wild cranberry that is glossy-green in summer and scarlet in winter. ”

“ Here, three thousand feet and more above the sea—upon which we looked down between cliff and woodland as through a funnel, and upon the roofs and whitewashed walls of fishing-villages on the edge of the blue—lived slow, sedate folks, who called their dogs off us and stared upon us as portents and gave us goat's-milk and bread, refusing the coins we proffered. The inhabitants of this Cape (I have since learned) are a race apart in Corsica; slow, peaceable, without politics and almost (as we should say) without patriotism. ”

“ Wind, north to south, varying east and west.' No siree! this is TO-DAY'S weather for Cape Cod, served right off the griddle on a hot plate, and cooked by the chef at that. You don't realize what a regular dime-museum wonder that feller is,” he says.
Well, I suppose we didn't. You see, Jonadab and me, like the rest of the folks around Wellmouth, had come to take Beriah Crocker and his weather notions as the regular thing, like baked beans on a Saturday night. ”

“ Although the other hands had remained by the schooner until she had just now dropped anchor in the cove below, he was not at all sure that they would sail with him for another voyage.
Why these new men should be more troubled by the silly tattle of the hoodoo than even the Portygees had been was a problem Tunis could not solve. And seamen were so scarce just then in Boston that he had been obliged to risk another voyage without engaging strangers to man the Seamew. Besides, being a true Cape Codder, he disliked hiring other than Cape men to work the schooner. ”

“ At daylight on the 7th the cutter was about eight miles East by South from Point Slade, with a projecting bluff cape in sight, which proved to be Captain Cook's Cape Hilsborough.
The country in the vicinity and particularly to the southward of the Cape is rocky and mountainous; but the lower grounds are verdant and well clothed with timber; and, judging from the numerous fires along the coast, it must be very populous; the islands near it are rocky and very barren, but many of them being wooded with pine-tree have a picturesque appearance. ”

“ One early Saturday in November I reached the Nauset Coast Guard Beach just as the peak of the high tide reached the shore and the unleashed fury of an angry Atlantic beat against the land to create one of the Cape’s most terrifying and awesome sights. The wind had shifted to the southwest and the sun was trying to break through the overcast but the seas piled higher and higher, as if through their own momentum. The whole surface of the sea was a menacing mass of tortured white breakers which threw their spume in smokey clouds a hundred feet into the air. ”

“ Corréard by a Physician, who has carefully examined Cape Verd.
"This Cape is very different from what we thought. Its surface is not above six or eight square leagues; its population is very numerous, and by no means in proportion with the part of this peninsula, proper for cultivation, which is not above one-third of its surface. Another third serves for pasture for the flocks of the blacks; and the other part is too much vulcanised, too full of rocks, to afford any hope of advantage in an agricultural view. ”

“ Admiral Rio d’Infanté landed there in 1498, and fixing upon the mouth of a river for the site of a settlement, recommended his countrymen to establish a colony there; his advice was, however, not followed, and other Portuguese navigators failed in some [5] slight attempts which they made to colonize this interesting part of Africa.
The Cape forms one of the great landmarks of the globe, separating the Atlantic from the Indian Ocean, and dividing the voyage to Hindoostan into two nearly equal portions ”

“ Annabell Coffin, she who was a Cuttle, was visiting his folks in Boston, and she learned that Sarah Bostwick's daughter was working behind the counter in some store there. She has to work for her livin', poor child."
"I swan!" ejaculated the captain.
Much as he had been about the world, Cap'n Ira looked upon most mundane affairs with the eyes of the true Cape man. Independence is bred in the bone of his tribe. A tradesman or storekeeper is, after all, not of the shipmaster caste. And a clerk, working "behind the counter" of any store, is much like a man before the mast. ”

“ On the N.W. side of the cape are two peaked rocks, like sugar-loaves: They lie N.W. by N., and S.E. by S., by compass, of each other. Some other straggling low rocks lie west of the cape, and one south of it; but they are all near the shore. From Christmas Sound to Cape Horn the course is E.S.E 1/4 E., distant thirty-one leagues. In the direction of E.N.E., three leagues from Cape Horn, is a rocky point, which I called Mistaken Cape, and is the southern point of the easternmost of Hermite Isles. Between these two capes there seemed to be a passage directly into Nassau Bay ”

“ It is a time to spend indoors, huddled up to the warmth of stove or open hearth, while the sturdy Cape houses settle down into the wind to weather it out. Above stairs the old houses yield gently to the wind in a motion that is reminiscent of the roll of a ship at sea. Like the ship, they will ride out this storm as they have many another throughout a long two centuries.
When a Nor’easter has passed, or settled down to a dull roar, it is a time for the Outer Beach, that magnificent stretch of shoreline that skirts the Cape from Provincetown to Chatham. ”

“ As the schooner crept across the bay, Hoppy’s gaze ranged along the low-lying shores of old Cape Cod. The long stretches of white strand glistened in the sunlight and the tiny hillocks, known as the dunes, seemed to be engaged in a brave effort to raise themselves above the tops of the sea pines and the stunted oaks of the neighboring groves. Billingsgate Point broke the sameness of the coastline and guarded the harbor of Wellfleet, the only important haven south of Provincetown, the other landing-places being small creeks and inlets. ”

“ He wasn't beginning to get out all there was in that ice-boat. And just then along comes another feller in the same kind of hooker and gives us a hail. There was two other chaps on the boat with him.
“Hello, Phil!” he yells, rounding his flat-iron into the wind abreast of ours and bobbing his night-cap. “I hoped you might be out. Are you game for a race?”
“Archie,” answers our skipper, solemn as a setting hen, “permit me to introduce to you Cap'n Jonadab Wixon and Admiral Barzilla Wingate, of Orham, on the Cape.” ”

“ It gave him a fictitious courage which he would not have had unarmed against almost any man—or woman—in Askatoon.
"You get a woman to do your fighting for you," he said hatefully. "You have to drag her in. It was you I meant to challenge, not the poor girl young enough to be your daughter." His hand went to his waistcoat pocket. Crozier saw and understood.
Suddenly Crozier's eyes blazed. The abnormal in him—the Celtic strain always at variance with the normal, an almost ultra-natural attendant of it awoke like a tempest in the tropics. ”

“ We then stood on for the sandy capes or bluffs and by half-past 9 A.M. the largest and perpendicular one bore south by west distant 8 or 9 miles, this I named Cape Farewell. I took a departure from it intending to run to Cape Albany (Otway) ; the wind from 4 A.M. has blown at east-north-east and from that to north-east with its usual hazy dirty weather, in consequence of which we kept our wind till noon to be certain of clearing the shoals and breakers lying off this end of the island. ”

“ Instead of going from hence to America, as was said, he stood away for New Zealand; where, in the Bay of Isles, he and some of his people were killed by the inhabitants. Captain Crozet, who succeeded to the command, returned by the way of the Phillipine Isles, with the two ships, to the island of Mauritius. He seemed to be a man possessed of the true spirit of discovery, and to have abilities. ”

“ This most splendid of all the speciaes of cormorants yet discovered, inhabits in considerable numbers the Rocky Cape at the entrance of the Columbia river, upon the sides of which, it often rests, and no doubt rears its young within the natural cavities which front the tempestuous ocean, and in situations wholly inaccessible to man. ”

“ Besides this land, which Captain Crozet told us was a long but very narrow island, extending east and west, Captain Marion, in about the latitude of 48° south, and from 16° to 30° of longitude east of the Cape of Good Hope, discovered six islands, which were high and barren. These, together with some islands lying between the Line and the southern tropic in the Pacific Ocean, were the principal discoveries made in this voyage, the account of which, we were told, was ready for publication. ”

“ Our calls are cut short for the want of wind, and we lie becalmed on the low, broad swells, majestically rolling in upon the Cape, only a mile to the south-west. Captain Knight is evidently unquiet at this proximity. A powerful current is setting rapidly in, carrying us over depths too great for our cables, up to the very cliffs. If the adventurous mariner, who first sighted this bold and forward headland, was bent upon christening it by an apostolic name, why did he not call it Cape St. Peter? All in all, it is certainly the finest coast scenery I have ever seen ”