Multibeam data were collected during R/V Polarstern cruise ANT-XVII/2. Data recording was executed on transit from Cape Town to Neumeyer Station and in Kong HÂkon VII. Sea. Data are unprocessed and may contain outliers and blunders. Therefore the data should not directly be used for grid calculations and charting projects but need to be edited furthermore. Because of a hardware problem the time stamps within the files are erroneously increased by one day starting at day 2000/03/03. This error was fixed for filenames but not for timestamps of events within the files. One file contains a measurement period not exceeding eight hours. The dataset consists of 161 files in ATLAS SURF format which are compressed with GZIP to size of 0.99 GB. SURF data files can be processed using the software packages CARIS HIPS/SIPS or with the open source software package MB-System (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/pi/MB-System/). The source code for an application programming interface (API) to read and write SURF data is released by the Hydrosweep manufacturer Atlas Hydrographic, Bremen, and published under the GNU GPL. Contact mailto:infobathy@awi.de for data access.