One who has experienced it can scarcely conceive of Antarctica without associating it irrevocably with its outer approaches. North of the Continent on every side is some fifteen hundred miles of landless water, like a necklace studded with storms pursuing one another endlessly around the world. Anchoring these defenses, like great ghostly bastions of the Powers of Darkness, the very fragments of violence move the tabular icebergs. Constantly patrolling these watery wastes, while deriving power from the huge seas, wheel the albatrosses. The wandering albatross here depicted is the largest of the species with an eleven-foot wingspread. Intruding this scene U.S.S. Glacier passes on her voyage around the Antarctic world, March and April 1956." --Commander Standish Backus.