Then (Especially If It Be True, As Many Believe, That
There Is A Region Of Open Sea About The Pole Itself) We Might Find
It As Easy To Reach Behring Straits By Travelling In A Straight Line
Over The North Pole, As By Threading The Straits And Bays North Of
America.
We turn our course until we have in sight a portion of the ice-
barred eastern coast of Greenland, Shannon Island.
Somewhere about
this spot in the seventy-fifth parallel is the most northern part of
that coast known to us. Colonel - then Captain - Sabine in the Griper
was landed there to make magnetic, and other observations; for the
same purpose he had previously visited Sierra Leone. That is where
we differ from our forefathers. They commissioned hardy seamen to
encounter peril for the search of gold ore, or for a near road to
Cathay; but our peril is encountered for the gain of knowledge, for
the highest kind of service that can now be rendered to the human
race.
Before we leave the Northern Sea, we must not omit to mention the
voyage by Spitzbergen northward, in 1818, of Captain Buchan in the
Dorothea, accompanied by Lieutenant Franklin, in the Trent. It was
Sir John Franklin's first voyage to the Arctic regions. This trip
forms the subject of a delightful book by Captain Beechey.
On our way to the south point of Greenland we pass near Cape North,
a point of Iceland. Iceland, we know, is the centre of a volcanic
region, whereof Norway and Greenland are at opposite points of the
circumference.
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