The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard (online e reader .txt) 📗

corals and marine degenerate worms, which started to live in little cells like coral, but have gone down in the world. And there were starfishes, sea-urchins, brittle-stars, feather-stars and sea-cucumbers. The sea-urchins are formed of hexagonal plates, the centre of each of which is a ball, upon which a spine works on a ball and socket joint. These spines are used for protection, and when large they can be used for locomotion. But the real means of locomotion are five double rows of water-tube feet, working by suction, by which they withdraw the water inside a receptacle in the shell, thereby forming a vacuum; starfishes do the same. We found a species of sea-urchin which had such large spines that they practically formed bars; the spines were twice as long as the sea-urchin and shaped just like oars, being even fluted. A lobster grows by discarding his suit, hiding and getting another, growing meanwhile. A snail or an oyster retains his original shell, and adds to it in layers all the way down, increasing one edge. But our sea-urchin grows by an increment of calcareous matter all round the outside of each plate. As the animal grows the plates get bigger.

There was a sea-cucumber which nurses its young, having a brood cavity which is really formed out of the mouth: this is a peculiarity of a new Antarctic genus found first on the Discovery. It has the most complex water-tubes, which it uses as legs, and a few limy rods in its soft skin instead of the bony calcareous plates of sea-urchins and starfish. After them came the feather-stars, a relic of the old crinoids which used to flourish in the carboniferous period, examples of which can be found in the Derbyshire limestone; and there were thousands of brittle-stars, like beautiful wheels of which the hubs and spokes remained, but not the circumference. These spokes or legs are muscular, sensory and locomotive; they differ from the starfishes in that they have no digestive glands in their legs, and from the feather-stars in that they do not use their legs to waft food into their mouths. Once upon a time they had a stalk and were anchored to a rock, and there are still very rare old stalked echinoderms living in the sea. This apparently geological thing was found by Wyville Thomson in 1868 still living in the seas to the north of Scotland, and this find started the Challenger Expedition for deep-sea soundings in 1872. But the Challenger brought back little in this line. Most of the species we found were peculiar to the Antarctic.

There were Polychaete worms by the hundred, showing the protrusable mouth, which is shoved into the mud and then brought back into the body, and the bristles on the highly developed projections which act as legs, by which they get about the mud. These beasts have apparently given rise to the Arthropods. In a modified and later form they had taken to living in a tube, both for protection and because they found that they could not go through the mud, which had become too viscous for them. So they stand up in a tube and collect the sediment which is falling by means of tentacles. They spread from one locality to another by going through a plankton embryonic stage in their youth. They may be compared to the mason worms, which also build tubes.

But as Lillie squatted on the poop surrounded by an inner ring of jars and tangled masses of the catch, and an outer ring of curious scientists, pseudo-scientists and seamen, no find pleased him so much as the frequent discovery of pieces of Cephalodiscus rarus, of which even now there are but some four jars full in the world. It is as interesting as it is uncommon, for its ancestor was a link between the vertebrates and invertebrates, though no one knows what it was like. It has been a vertebrate and gone back, and now has the signs of a notochord in early life, and it also has gills. First found on the Graham’s Land side of the Antarctic continent, it has only recently been discovered in the Ross Sea, and occurs nowhere else in the world so far as is known.

We left Granite Harbour in the early morning of January 23, and started to make our way out. Our next job was to pick up the geological specimens at Evans Coves, where Campbell and his men had wintered in the igloo, and also to leave a depot there for future explorers. We met very heavy pack, having to return at least twelve miles and try another way. “The sea has been freezing out here, which seems an extraordinary thing at this time of year. There was a thin layer of ice over the water between the floes this morning, and I feel sure that most of these big level floes, of which we have seen several, are the remains of ice which has frozen comparatively recently.”362 The propeller had a bad time, constantly catching up on ice. At length we were some thirty miles north of Cape Bird making roughly towards Franklin Island. That night we made good progress in fairly open water, and we passed Franklin Island during the day. But the outlook was so bad in the evening (January 24) that we stopped and banked fires.

“We lay just where we stopped until at 5 a.m. on January 25, when the ice eased up sufficiently for us to get along, and we started to make the same slow progress⁠—slow ahead, stop (to the engine-room)⁠—bump and grind for a bit⁠—then slow astern, stop⁠—slow ahead again, and so on, until at 7 p.m., after one real big bump which brought the dinner some inches off the table, Cheetham brought us out into open water.”363

Mount Nansen rose sheer and massive ahead of us with a table top, and at 3 a.m. on January 26