CHAPTER VIII.
BOUND FOR THE FALKLANDS.
On the 8th of September, in the evening, I had taken leave of His Excellency the Governor-General of the Archipelago of Tristan d'Acunha--for such is the official title bestowed upon himself by that excellent fellow, Glass, ex-corporal of artillery in the British Army.

On the following day, before dawn, the _Halbrane_ sailed.
After we had rounded Herald Point, the few houses of Ansiedlung disappeared behind the extremity of Falmouth Bay.

A fine breeze from the east carried us along gaily.
During the morning we left behind us in succession Elephant Bay, Hardy Rock, West Point, Cotton Bay, and Daly's Promontory; but it took the entire day to lose sight of the volcano of Tristan d'Acunha, which is eight thousand feet high; its snow-clad bulk was at last veiled by the shades of evening.
During that week our voyage proceeded under the most favourable conditions; if these were maintained, the end of the month of September ought to bring us within sight of the first peaks of the Falkland Group; and so, very sensibly towards the south; the schooner having descended from the thirty-eighth parallel to the fifty-fifth degree of latitude.
The most daring, or, perhaps I ought to say, the most lucky of those discoverers who had preceded the _Halbrane_, under the command of Captain Len Guy, in the Antarctic seas, had not gone beyond--Kemp, the sixty-sixth parallel; Ballerry, the sixty-seventh; Biscoe, the sixty-eighth; Bellinghausen and Morrell, the seventieth; Cook, the seventy-first; Weddell, the seventy-fourth.

And it was beyond the eighty-third, nearly five hundred and fifty miles farther, that we must go to the succour of the survivors of the _Jane_! I confess that for a practical man of unimaginative temperament, I felt strangely excited; a nervous restlessness had taken possession of me.

I was haunted by the figures of Arthur Pym and his companions, lost in Antarctic ice-deserts.