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Article: DANTE'S PURGATORY.(Kerguelens)
- Article from:
- Quadrant
- Article date:
- July 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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ON THE EDGE OF THE HOWLING FIFTIES
IT HAS BEEN SAID that Dante's Purgatory in the Divine Comedy was located in the Southern Ocean somewhere between Africa and Australia. The early explorers were sure a great south land must exist there. The treacherous Admiral Yves de Kerguelen, glimpsing a large, forbidding archipelago in these bleak and windswept oceans, returned to France claiming they were inhabited, with forests, fruit, pastures and untold riches. Captain Cook, rather more candidly, called them the Desolation Islands. Now part of one of France's "overseas territories", they are still, with the Crozet group, Amsterdam and St Paul, the most isolated islands in ...