lieutenant of the Erebus], in which a line of low land might be seen; but its determination was too uncertain to be left unexplored; and as the wind blowing feebly from the west prevented our making any way in that direction through the young ice that now covered the surface of the ocean in every part, as far as we could see from the mast-head, I determined to steer towards the bight to give it a closer examination, and to learn with more certainty its continuity or otherwise.  At noon we were in latitude 76 deg. 32’ S., longitude 166 deg. 12’ E., dip 88 deg. 24’ and variation 107 deg. 18’ E.

“During the afternoon we were nearly becalmed, and witnessed some magnificent eruptions of Mount Erebus, the flame and smoke being projected to a great height; but we could not, as on a former occasion, discover any lava issuing from the crater; although the exhibitions of to-day were upon a much grander scale....

“Soon after midnight (February 16-17) a breeze sprang up from the eastward and we made all sail to the southward until 4 A.M., although we had an hour before distinctly traced the land entirely round the bay connecting Mount Erebus with the mainland.  I named it McMurdo Bay, after the senior lieutenant of the Terror, a compliment that his zeal and skill well merited."[10] It is now called McMurdo Sound.

In making the mistake of connecting Erebus with the mainland Ross was looking at a distance upon the Hut Point Peninsula running out from the S.W. corner of Erebus towards the west.  He probably saw Minna Bluff, which juts out from the mainland towards the east.  Between them, and in front of the Bluff, lie White Island, Black Island and Brown Island.  To suppose them to be part of a line of continuous land was a very natural mistake.

Ross broke through the pack ice into an unknown sea:  he laid down many hundreds of miles of mountainous coast-line, and (with further work completed in 1842) some 400 miles of the Great Ice Barrier:  he penetrated in his ships to the extraordinarily high latitude of 78 deg. 11’ S., four degrees farther than Weddell.  The scientific work of his expedition was no less worthy of praise.  The South Magnetic Pole was fixed with comparative accuracy, though Ross was disappointed in his natural but “perhaps too ambitious hope I had so long cherished of being permitted to plant the flag of my country on both the magnetic Poles of our globe.”

Before all things he was at great pains to be accurate, both in his geographical and scientific observations, and his records of meteorology, water temperatures, soundings, as also those concerning the life in the oceans through which he passed, were not only frequent but trustworthy.

When Ross returned to England in 1843 it was impossible not to believe that the case of those who advocated the existence of a South Polar continent was considerably strengthened.  At the same time there was no proof that the various blocks of land which had been discovered were connected with one another.  Even now in 1921, after twenty years of determined exploration aided by the most modern appliances, the interior of this supposed continent is entirely unknown and uncharted except in the Ross Sea area, while the fringes of the land are only discovered in perhaps a dozen places on a circumference of about eleven thousand miles.