ROUND ABOUT
THE NORTH POLE
CHAPTER I
SPITSBERGEN
Iceland—Greenland—America—Sebastian Cabot—Robert Thorne—The North-east Passage—Willoughby—Chancellor—Borough—The North Cape rounded—The White Sea reached—The First Arctic Search Expedition—Pet and Jackman—Brunel—Cornelis Nai—Barents reaches 77° 20´—Second voyage of Nai—The Samoyeds—Rijp, Jacob Van Heemskerck and Barents—Bear Island discovered—Spitsbergen discovered—The Dutch reach 79° 49´—Stephen Bennet—Welden—Jonas Poole—Henry Hudson reaches 80° 23´—Poole starts the British whaling trade—Baffin's voyages to Spitsbergen—Pellham winters at Green Harbour.
The story of the lands within the Arctic Circle is a record of the brave deeds of healthy men. This would seem to be true were we to take the story, if we could, back to the days when man followed the retreat of the glaciers, as he may in turn have to retreat before them, such a condition of things being not beyond the range of probability though it may be remote. For the boundaries of the frozen north are not dependent on a line of latitude, and have never been the same from period to period, or even from year to year. In some cases they have changed considerably within the Christian era, and it is evident that the ice is not eternal. The fossils declare that the climate round the North Pole has varied greatly, and must in comparatively recent ages have been comfortably warm, so genial indeed that some people would have us believe that men came from there in their last distribution. Not, however, with such migrants from the far north do we concern ourselves, but with those who have endeavoured to get there in historical times by different lines of approach, as we follow the circle round from east to west and note the record of each section by itself.
Who was the first to sail to the northern seas we know not. Suffice it for us that in 875 Ingolf the jarl, from Norway, refusing to live under the sway of Harold Haarfager, sighted Mount Oraefa. As he neared the coast, overboard went the carved wood; and where the wood drifted ashore he founded Reikjavik. But he was not the first in Iceland, for the Irish monastery had been there for years when he arrived, though the monks retired to their old country when they found the Norsemen had come to stay.
Then the Icelander Gunnbiörn, driven westward in a gale, sighted the strange land he called White Shirt from its snowfields, which Eric the Red, following a long time afterwards, more happily renamed. "What shall we call the land?" he was asked. "Call it Green Land," replied Eric. "But it is not always green!" "It matters not: give it a good name and people will come to it!"
THE SUMMIT OF ORAEFA
From a photo