By Tuesday night, September 27, we had finished the coaling, and we
celebrated the occasion by a champagne dinner. At the same time we raised
steam. Scott was anxious to push on, and so indeed was everybody else.
But the wind was not disposed to help us, and headed us a good deal
during the next few days, and it was not until October 2 that we were
able to set all plain sail in the morning watch.
This absence of westerly winds in a region in which they are usually too
strong for comfort was explained by Pennell by a theory that we were
travelling in an anticyclone, which itself was travelling in front of a
cyclone behind us. We were probably moving under steam about the same
pace as the disturbance, which would average some 150 miles a day.
From this may be explained many of the reports of continual bad weather
met by sailing ships and steamers in these latitudes. If we had been a
sailing ship without auxiliary steam the cyclone would have caught us up,
and we should have been travelling with it, and consequently in continual
bad weather. On the other hand, a steamer pure and simple would have
steamed through good and bad alike. But we, with our auxiliary steam,
only made much the same headway as the disturbance travelling in our
wake, and so remained in the anticyclone.
Physical observations were made on the outward voyage by Simpson and
Wright[36] into the atmospheric electricity over the ocean, one set of
which consisted of an inquiry into the potential gradient, and
observations were undertaken at Melbourne for the determination of the
absolute value of the potential gradient over the sea.
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