"Antarctic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him a sheer absurdity. The "Dandy" and a crew of nine convicts navigate a brig round the world! Preposterous; why, not a man aboard could work a reckoning! His nautical fancy pictured the Osprey helplessly rolling on the swell of the Southern Ocean, or hopelessly locked in the ice of the Antarctic Seas, and he dimly guessed at the fate of the deluded ten. Even if they got safe to port, the chances of final escape were all against them, for what account could they give of themselves? Overpowered by these reflections, the honest fellow ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... guess why this constellation should have been called the Bear. Yet the name has had a certain influence. From the Greek word arctos (bear) has come arctic, and for its antithesis, antarctic. From the Latin word trio (ox of labor) has come septentrion, the seven oxen. Etymology is not always logical. Is not the word "venerate" ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... them in midair across chasms and up knife-edged precipices, by ropes passed over timbers wedged somehow into the rocks. I was shown a photograph of a party of these pioneers working in these snowy solitudes last winter. They might have been a group of Scott's or Shackleton's men toiling in the Antarctic wilderness. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... full circumstantial narrative such as boys delight in. The ship so sadly destined to wreck on Kerguelen Land is manned by a very lifelike party, passengers and crew. The life in the Antarctic Iceland is well treated."—Athenaeum. ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... and is always in the south.[11] I have been told of this and other matters by MARCO the Venetian, the most extensive traveller and the most diligent inquirer whom I have ever known. He saw this same star under the Antarctic; he described it as having a great tail, and drew a figure of it thus. He also told me that he saw the Antarctic Pole at an altitude above the earth apparently equal to the length of a soldier's lance, whilst the Arctic Pole was as much below the horizon. 'Tis from ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... distance we had to go, but involved us in a gale which effectually stopped our progress for a week. It was our first taste of the gentle zephyrs which waft their sweetness over New Zealand, after sweeping over the vast, bleak, iceberg-studded expanse of the Antarctic Ocean. Our poor Kanakas were terribly frightened, for the weather of their experience, except on the rare occasions when they are visited by the devastating hurricane, is always fine, steady, and warm. For the first time in their lives they saw hail, and their wonder was too great for words. ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... be only a secondary matter, for within a few years the entire trade between India and Europe would be drawn to that spot. The merchant was no longer to expose his goods to the capricious gales of the Antarctic Seas, for the easier, safer, cheaper route must be navigated, which was shortly destined to double the amount of trade. Whoever possessed that door which opened both to the Atlantic and Pacific, as the shortest and least expensive route would give law ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... silence, and continued to coast round the line of cliffs, which were as even and unbroken as some of those monstrous Antarctic ice-fields which I have seen depicted as stretching from horizon to horizon and towering high above the mast-heads of the ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... my opposite in the railway carriage turned out to be Sir James Ross, the Antarctic discoverer. We had some very pleasant talk together. I knew all about him, as Dayman (one of the lieutenants of the "Rattlesnake") had sailed under his command; oddly enough we afterwards went to lodge at the same house, but as we were attending our respective sections all ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... any Monomotopan quill-driver; no modern visitor to that delightful island has come across a litterateur whether in the worse or in the best hotels; and such reading as the inhabitants enjoy is entirely confined to works imported by large steamers from the neighbouring Antarctic Continent. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... big game, and searching for big diamonds and rubies. He had written books on all sorts of out-of-the-way subjects, such as "The Flora of Chatham Islands," "Poisonous Spiders (genus Latrodectua) of Sardinia," "Fossil Reptilia and Moa Remains of New Zealand," and "Seals of the Antarctic." But his chief and greatest hobby was precious stones, of which ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... cried, with the resolute air of an explorer contemplating the Antarctic. "The world is too much with me. I will recover my true personality in the wilderness. I will commune with my own ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... erroneously, supposed to be extinct at the present day; but you have before you a living and convincing proof that mermaids still exist. I confess that until I was able to obtain this unique specimen, which was captured while basking in the sun and singing a love song upon an iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean, I shared the opinions of my fellow scientists that the mermaid was a fabulous or extinct creature; for during a lifetime devoted to exhibiting the mysterious marvels of nature to the American public it had ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... walked on patas (paws), like bears—are a superior race to the Fuegians, larger in stature than most Europeans, great riders, and clever in catching guanacos by means of bolas, i.e. two round stones attached to a string. If the Fuegians are Antarctic Esquimaux, the Patagonians are Antarctic Tartars, leading a wandering life under tents made of skins of horses and guanacos, and hating all settled habits, but not so utterly inhospitable and impracticable as their neighbours beyond the Strait. In truth, the division is not clearly marked, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... km2 Comparative area: slightly less than 1.5 times the size of the US; second-smallest continent (after Australia) Land boundaries: none, but see entry on Disputes Coastline: 17,968 km Maritime claims: none, but see entry on Disputes Disputes: Antarctic Treaty defers claims (see Antarctic Treaty Summary below); sections (some overlapping) claimed by Argentina, Australia, Chile, France (Adelie Land), New Zealand (Ross Dependency), Norway (Queen Maud Land), ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that space to mar it or make a noise. Away down here fifty-five degrees south of the Equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar tongue—a foreign tongue—tongue bred among the ice-fields of the Antarctic—a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come from. It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night and find it still pulsing there. I wish you were here—land, but ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
