We planned to explore a great area, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea;[109] regions explored by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd.[110] We expected to get a quite unprecedented amount of material – especially in the pre-Cambrian[111] strata. We wished also to obtain a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life history of this realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth’s past. The Antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical; and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy, and detail.

The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press,[112] and through the later articles of Pabodie and myself. There were four men from the University – Pabodie, Lake[113] of the biology department, Atwood[114] of the physics department – also a meteorologist – and myself, representing geology – besides sixteen assistants: seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aeroplane pilots, they were competent wireless operators as well. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships were fully manned.[115]

The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation[116] financed the expedition. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were loaded. We were marvelously well-equipped for our specific purposes. As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd, 1930, taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal,[117] and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania,[118] where we got final supplies. Our ship captains were J. B. Douglas,[119] commanding the brig Arkham, and Georg Thorfinnssen,[120] commanding the Miskatonic – both veteran whalers in Antarctic waters.

At about 62° South Latitude we noticed our first icebergs – table-like objects with vertical sides – and just before reaching the Antarctic circle,[121] which we crossed on October 20th with appropriately ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics. Very often the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

Pushing through the ice, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175°. On the morning of October 26th a snow-clad mountain chain appeared on the south. That was an outpost of the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross,[122] and our task was to round Cape Adare[123] and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land[124] to our base on the shore of McMurdo Sound,[125] at the foot of the volcano Erebus[126] in South Latitude 77° 9’.

The last part of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks of mystery, white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich,[127] and of the disturbing descriptions of the evil plateau of Leng[128] which appear in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had looked into that monstrous book at the college library.