Then one day, came the cry of “Land ho!” from the masthead and peering ahead the boys caught sight of a shadowy, gray mass looming above the low-hung clouds against the southern horizon. Presently, as they watched, Tom uttered an exclamation and grasped Jim’s arm. Close to the bark, a huge dark body rose suddenly from the sea, a long-snouted head reared up and with a coughing, snarling bark and a flash of great, white teeth, the creature disappeared beneath the sea.
“A sea elephant!” cried Jim, and intently the two scanned the surface of the water for its reappearance. Soon they were rewarded. Again the giant seal flung itself upward from the curving crest of a wave and then another and another appeared until, all about the speeding ship, the sea was dotted with the monsters, seemingly unafraid of the vessel and playing about like enormous porpoises.
Soon, however, the boys’ attentions were diverted from the sea elephants, for ahead they caught sight of thousands of bobbing black and white forms floating upon the waves, now leaping several feet in the air, anon ducking beneath the sea, at times standing upright and apparently clapping hands or again tumbling over and over like playful puppies.
“What in the world are they?” asked Jim as Cap’n Pem approached.
“Penguins,” replied the old whaleman. “Ye’ll see ’em by tens o’ thousan’s on shore.”
In a few moments more, the bark was in the midst of the flock of the strange fishlike birds, and on every side, ahead and astern, the water was alive with them and both boys were fascinated watching their droll antics. Then they were interrupted by orders to shorten sail still further, and as the bark rolled along over the rapidly smoothing sea, the boys’ interests were centered on the distant island they were approaching. Desolate, forbidding and bleak, it appeared, a vast, uprising, towering mass of dull-colored rock, flanked by stony hills and rimmed by pebbly beaches and outstanding cliffs against which the long Antarctic swells broke in great sheets of thundering surf.
Nearer and nearer drew the _Hector_. Forward a man was steadily heaving the lead; at the catheads stood the second mate with his men ready at any instant to let go the anchor; ready at the braces stood the men waiting for the word to back the yards, while on the poop stood the captain and the chief mate, the one, studying the island through his glasses, the other, scanning the ship and sails and all on the alert to bring the bark to and anchor her in safety off the forbidding shores of Elephant Island. Now, upon the hillsides, the boys could see patches of dried and dead herbage among the rocks. Here and there were sheets of ice and snow still lingering in the shadows of cliffs and ledges. Upon the beach were scattered masses of rotten ice, and everywhere among them, a moving, dark mass that covered the shingle from end to end, were hundreds of mighty sea elephants whose sharp, incessant barking was borne plainly to those on the ship. Scattered upon the hillsides and on the rising ground back of the beach were countless flecks of white which at first the boys had mistaken for snow, but now, as the ship drew near, they saw that they were moving, that they were alive, and suddenly it dawned upon them that they were birds—thousands of albatrosses—while vast areas of gray and white which the boys had thought were ice now resolved themselves into tens of thousands of penguins, standing upright with white breasts towards the oncoming bark and looking like an army of tiny men.