Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.12033

    Devil’s Punch Bowl, Kerguelen Islands

    Date
    1840
    Creator
    John Robertson (British) , Naval surgeon
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (drawing): 250mm
    width (drawing): 205mm
    Subject
    Content object
    nature
       > landscape
    Description
    View of the Devil’s Punch Bowl at White’s Bay on the Kerguelen Islands in the Southern Indian Ocean, intended to show local geological features. The author, John Robertson, accompanied a small expedition commanded by Lieutenant Bird, comprising two boats from the main expedition ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, charged with surveying and examining the region’s geology and zoology.

    Headed ‘Diagram the 4th’ in the manuscript version of the paper ‘Catalogue of geological specimens procured at “Kerguelen” during the months of May, June & July 1840’, by John Robertson. The paper was read by the author to the Royal Society on 20 May 1841 and noted in Abstracts of the papers printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London from 1837 to 1843 inclusive vol.4 (Richard and John E Taylor, London, 1843), p.305. This original account is signed by Roberson, ‘HMS Terror, Van D[iemen’s] Land 9th Sept. 1840.’

    Inscribed above: ‘Devil’s Punch Bowl. Remarkable funnel shaped cavity in a mountain…’

    John Robertson was the surgeon aboard HMS Terror during James Clarke Ross’s Erebus and Terror Antarctic Expedition of 1839-1843.
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Oceania
          > Kerguelen Islands
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