. Fig. 2. Local observations. The South Georgia whaHng grounds. Fig. 3. Local observations. The Bransfield Strait region. The most recent account of the enduring obstruction that manifestly exists in the heart of the Weddell embayment is given by Fuchs (1958), who, describing the voyage of the 'Theron' in 1955-6, when, beset near 68° S, 25° W, she narrowly escaped freezing in, records the following interesting passage: 'All the time the combination of south-easterly winds and a south-westerly current was moving the whole melange of pack ice, bergs, and ship to the west and north. I became conv
. Fig. 2. Local observations. The South Georgia whaHng grounds. Fig. 3. Local observations. The Bransfield Strait region. The most recent account of the enduring obstruction that manifestly exists in the heart of the Weddell embayment is given by Fuchs (1958), who, describing the voyage of the 'Theron' in 1955-6, when, beset near 68° S, 25° W, she narrowly escaped freezing in, records the following interesting passage: 'All the time the combination of south-easterly winds and a south-westerly current was moving the whole melange of pack ice, bergs, and ship to the west and north. I became convinced from our drift of fifteen to twenty miles each day that the ice of the central Weddell Sea is always turning in a clockwise direction, a certain quantity of floes and bergs being constantly delivered to the open water along the northern edge of the ice while the remainder continues to rotate as a hard core for many years'. Shackleton (1919) speaks in similar terms, referring to the great quantities of ice that sweep along the continental coast from the east under the influence of the prevailing current, filling up the ' bight of the Weddell Sea as they move north in a great semicircle', and, like Fuchs, suggesting that some of this ice ' doubtless describes almost a complete circle'. The pack of the central Weddell Sea in short presents an insuperable obstacle to southing vessels. I saw something of it in January 1932 and wrote the following account of it (Marr, 1933) shortly afterwards: ' It was by far the heaviest ice that any of us had yet seen, stretching solidly to the south- ward without a single crack through which a ship might force a passage. It had apparently been 1 Less than a year ago, however, American ice-breakers, working in the eastern part of the Pacific sector, did in fact succeed in penetrating to an ice-bound coast in 100° W (Anon., 19606). 3-2
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