3-065-928 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Ocean Depth Exploring Voyage: Grave Island, Royal Sound, Kerguelen Land, 1874. 'The four years' service of H.M.S. Challenger, with a party of scientific men, employed by her Majesty's Government in exploring the depths of the great southern oceans, their currents, tides, and temperature, their atmospheric conditions, and their vegetation and animal life, is still watched by us with great interest. Kerguelen Land, a lonely group of islands between the Indian and the Antarctic Oceans, equally distant from the southernmost points of Africa and Australia, is the subject of our Illustration..."We experienced the finest weather in the neighbourhood of Royal Sound, the deepest bay in the south coast. Its scenery is magnificent and lovely; with a labyrinth of innumerable islets interspersed over upwards of twenty miles of nearly landlocked waters...This was well and appropriately named by Cook the Royal Sound. He was always happy in his nomenclature of newly-discovered land, and probably, when he called it 'Royal,' as being situated between the capes he named after the King and the Prince of Wales, he saw the fitness of the name in another sense".' From "Illustrated London News", 1874.