1772.
December.
dismal scene, and gave us some idea of a southern Greenland.
Sunday 13.The number of icy masses encreased around us every day, so that we numbered upwards of twenty of a vast size on the 13th in the afternoon. One of them was full of black spots, which were taken for seals by some, and for aquatic birds by others, though we could not find that they even shifted their places. However seals being hitherto looked upon as certain signs of land, we sounded in the evening with a line of one hundred and fifty fathoms, but found no bottom. The latitude we were now in, was that in which Captain Lozier Bouvet had placed his pretended discovery of Cape Circumcision, and our longitude was only a few degrees to the eastward of it: the general expectation of seeing land, was therefore very great, and every little circumstance like the preceding roused all our attention; the clouds a-head were curiously examined at every moment, since every one was eager to be the first to announce the land. We had already had several false alarms from the fallacious conformation of fog-banks, or that of islands of ice half hid in snow storms, and our consort the Adventure had repeatedly made the signals for seeing land, deceived by such appearances: but now, the imagination warmed with the idea of M. Bouvet's discovery, one of our lieutenants, after having repeatedly been up to the mast-head, (about six o’clock in the morning onthe
