"Exactly," smiled the captain, "but there is still another object scarcely of less importance than the ones that I and the professor," he added with a smile, "have enumerated."
"You boys have all heard of the daring rovers who set out centuries ago in their ships to explore unknown oceans?"
The boys nodded.
"You mean the Vikings?" asked Frank.
"Yes," replied the captain. "Well, some time ago a member of one of our great scientific bodies, while traveling in Sweden, discovered in a remote village an odd legend concerning some sailors who claimed to have seen an old Viking ship frozen in the ice near the Great Barrier. They were poor and superstitious whalemen and did not dare to disturb it, but they brought home the story."
"And you think the ship is still there," broke in Harry.
"If they really saw such a thing there is every reason to suppose that it is," rejoined the lieutenant. "In the ice anything might be preserved almost indefinitely. Providing the yarn of the whalemen is true, we now come to the most interesting part of the story. The scientist, who has a large acquaintance among librarians and custodians of old manuscripts in European libraries, happened to mention one night to a friend what he had heard in the little Norwegian fishing village. His friend instantly surprised him by declaring that he had an idea what the ship was.
"To make a long story short, he told him that years before, while examining some manuscripts in Stockholm, he had read an account of a Viking ship that in company with another had sailed for what must have been the extreme South Pacific. One of the ships returned laden with ivory and gold, which latter may have been obtained from some mine whose location has long since been lost, but the other never came back. That missing ship was the ship of Olaf the Rover, and as her consort said, she had last been seen in the South Pacific. The manuscript said that the returned rovers stated that they had become parted from the ship of Olaf in a terrific gale amid much ice and great ice mountains. That must have meant the antarctic regions. This much they do know, that Olaf's ship was stripped of her sails and helpless when they were compelled by stress of weather to abandon her. It is my theory and the theory of a man high in the government, who has authorized me to make this search, that the ship of Olaf was caught in a polar current and that the story heard so many years after about the frozen ship in the ice is true."
"Then somewhere down there along the Great Barrier there is a Viking ship full of ivory and gold, you believe?" asked Frank.
"I do," said the captain.