Let us hope there may be land at the exact spot, for then the position can be checked at leisure, and there will be no doubt of its having been reached. Joseph Moxon, Hydrographer to the King, in 1652 met at Amsterdam a sailor of a Greenland ship which "went not out to fish that summer, but only to take in the lading of the whole fleet to bring it to an early market"—in other words, to act as a carrier—which ship, before the whaling fleet had caught enough to lade her, had by order of the Company sailed to the North Pole and back again, and even two degrees beyond it; no land seen, no ice, and the weather as it was in summer-time at Amsterdam.

A sailor's yarn told in a tavern? Only this and nothing more, perhaps; though a good many things were kept dark in the whaling trade as in other trades. But if there had been an island at the Pole we might eventually have been able to verify that ancient mariner's tale.

INDEX

PLYMOUTH

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.

PRINTERS

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

  1. Silently corrected simple spelling, grammar, and typographical errors.
  2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.