Discovery is the essence of expedition travel and the true soul of Antarctica. The seventh continent is a land of remarkable beauty and breath-taking contrasts, where we cruise from bright sunshine into howling gales, surrounded by forbidding glaciers and confiding wildlife. But it is the remote, unknown and still truly wild nature of the Antarctic that makes it unique. It is a diamond at the end of the earth, beckoning us to undertake the long journey necessary to discover it for ourselves, to see what few have seen and learn a few more of its secrets.
Joinville Island lies between the Weddell Sea and the Erebus and Terror Gulf, a region steeped in the stories of generations of explorers. In their footsteps, with their spirit, we came to a lonely peninsula on the south coast known as Tay Head, landing there for the first time a few weeks ago and again on this trip. So far as we know no one has been ashore there in the 150 years since the sealers left the region, leaving it to the skuas and Antarctic terns and the now returned fur seals. What a discovery! Long stretches of raised cobble beaches gave us a perfect opportunity for hiking, over to the Adelie penguin colony or past the nesting terns to the foot of the glacier where we found a rare and beautiful Emperor penguin.
Offshore lie more wonders. The rocks of the beach fall away nearly vertically to great depth, sheer underwater cliffs sheltering a rich community of marine creatures from marauding icebergs. Diving there while the others were ashore, I filmed feeding sea cucumbers, bright orange seastars, tiny delicate sea-jellies and this marvelous creature which I had never encountered before. It is an opisthobranch mollusc, a sea slug, related to nudibranchs and to the slugs and snails of your garden, and it is quite a large one, nearly the size of a football. The rolled rhinophores, the horn like sense organs, suggest that it may be related to the Anaspidea, a group known as the sea hares, but I have been unable to identify it further and there is a real possibility that it is a previously unrecorded species. It will take more research and study to answer this question definitely, but the possibility is very exciting. A new animal found living in a new place; real discovery aboard the M/S Endeavour.
