[151] "A summary Relation of what hath been hitherto discovered in the matter of the North-East passage; communicated by a good Hand" (Phil. Trans., vol. x. p. 417. London, 1675).
[152] The time when the voyage was made is not stated in the letter quoted. Harris says that he with great difficulty ascertained the year of the successful voyage to the eastward to be 1670. He says further that the persons who gave him this information also stated that, at the time when this petition was given in to the States-General, it was also asserted that there was no difficulty in sailing northwards from Spitzbergen (Greenland), and that many Dutch vessels had actually done it. To confirm this statement the merchants proposed that the logs of the Spitzbergen fleet for the year 1655 should be examined. This was done. In seven of them it was found recorded that the vessels had sailed to 79° N. L. Three other logs agreed in the point that on the 1st August, 1655, 88° 56' was observed. The sea here was open and the swell heavy (Harris, Nav. Bibl., ii. p. 453). J. R. Forster (Geschichte der Entdeckungen und Schiffsfahrten im Norden, Frankfurt a. d. Oder, 1874) appears to place the voyage eastward of Novaya Zemlya in the period before 1614. It is, however, probable that the voyage in question is Vlamingh's remarkable one in 1664, or that in 1666, of which I have already given an account.
[153] In more recent times the whalers have been more modest in their statements about high northern latitudes reached. Thus a Dutchman who had gone whale-fishing for twenty-two years, at an accidental meeting with Tschitschagoff in Bell Sound in the year 1766, stated among other things that he himself had once been in 81°, but that he heard that other whalers had been in 83° and had seen land over the ice. He had seen the east coast of Greenland (Spitzbergen) only once in 75° N. L. (Herrn von Tschitschagoff Russisch-kaiserliehen Admirals Reise nach dem Eissmeer, St. Petersburg, 1793, p. 83). Dutch shipmasters too, who in the beginning of the seventeenth century penetrated north of Spitzbergen to 82°, said that they had thence seen land towards the north (Muller, Geschiedenis der Noordsche Compagnie.p. 180).
[154] Witsen states, p. 43, that he had conversed with a Dutch seaman, Benedictus Klerk, who had formerly served on board a whaler, and afterwards been a prisoner in Corea. He had asserted that in whales that were killed on the coast of that country he had found Dutch harpoons. The Dutch then carried on whale-fishing only in the north part of the Atlantic. The find thus shows that whales can swim from one ocean to the other. As we know that these colossal inhabitants of the Polar Sea do not swim from one ice-ocean to the other across the equator, this observation must be considered very important, especially at a time when the question whether Asia and America are connected across the Pole was yet unsettled. Witsen also enumerates, at p. 900, several occasions on which stone harpoons were found in the skins of whales caught in the North Atlantic. These harpoons, however, may as well be derived from the wild races, unacquainted with iron, at Davis Strait, as from tribes living on the north part of the Pacific. At Kamschatka, too, long before whale-fishing by Europeans began in Behring's Sea, harpoons marked with Latin letters were found in whales (Steller, Beschreibung von dem Lande Kamtschatka, Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1774, p. 102).
[155] The account of Wood's voyage was printed in London in 1694 by Smith and Walford, printers to the Royal Society (according to a statement by Barrington, The possibility of approaching the North Pole asserted, 2nd Edition, London, 1818, p. 34). I have only had an opportunity of seeing extracts from the account of this voyage in Harris and others.
[156] Barrington published a number of papers on this question, which are collected in the work whose title is given above, of which there were two editions.
[157] At several places in his Mittheilungen, 1855-79.
[158] That thin sheets of ice are formed in clear and calm weather, even in the open sea and over great depths, was observed several times during the expedition of 1868. But when we consider that salt water has no maximum of density situated above the freezing-point, that ice is a bad conductor of heat, and that the clear, newly-formed ice is soon covered by a layer of snow which hinders radiation, it appears to me to be improbable that the ice-covering at deep, open places can become so thick that it is not broken up even by a moderate storm. Even the shallow harbour at Mussel Bay first froze permanently in the beginning of February, and in the end of January the swell in the harbour was so heavy, that all the three vessels of the Swedish Expedition were in danger of being wrecked—in consequence of the tremendous sea in 80° N.L. in the end of January! The sea must then have been open very far to the north-west On the west coast of Spitzbergen the sea in winter is seldom completely frozen within sight of land. Even at Barents' winter haven on the north-east coast of Novaya Zemlya, the sea during the coldest season of the year was often free of ice, and Hudson's statement, "that it is not surprising that the navigator falls in with so much ice in the North Atlantic, when there are so many sounds and bays on Spitzbergen," shows that even he did not believe in any ice being formed in the open sea.