328 HOIV LATITUDE IS RECKONED 



The pole, by the way, is the very best point at which to take observations, 

 for the reason that there the error due to refraction is likely to be less than 

 at any other point on earth. 



COST OF POLAR EXPEDITIONS. 



A writer named Walter Leon Sawyer has quite interesting facts about the 

 cost of polar expeditions. He says : 



The "promoter," of the vulgar sort, he of the sordid imagination, who 

 demands from every outlay a return of profit, has not had much to do with 

 modern expeditions to the Arctic, though in earlier times his trail was over 

 them all. Then, while the northwest passage to India, not the North Pole, 

 was the goal of ambition, the discovery of such a route seeming to insure 

 commercial supremacy, kings turned speculators and hard-headed merchants 

 made ventures that must have figured oddly in matter-of-fact account books, 

 Walter Leon Sawyer says in the Boston Transcript. 



Yet the first polar expedition, after the interregnum that followed Norse 

 colonization of Iceland and discovery of Greenland, was discreetly accounted 

 for by Henry VIII, who ordered it. "For discoverie even to the North Pole, 

 two faire ships well manned and victualled, having in them divers cunning 

 men to seek strange regions," set out in 1527; but one was lost north of New- 

 foundland, and the other, having discovered nothing went home. 



Sebastian Cabot, a little later, revived interest in Arctic enterprise and 

 prom.pted the sending of Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor "for 

 the search and discovery of the northern parts of the world, to open a way 

 and passage to our men, for travel to new and unknown kingdoms." Wil- 

 loughby died, Chancellor found Archangel and opened a trade with Russia. 

 And, following Chancellor's success Elizabeth instigated the Muscovy com- 

 pany in 1575 to license Sir Martin Frobisher, who sought the northwest 

 passage, found some mica schist which he took for gold, and wasted two sub- 

 sequent voyages in gathering more. In 1580, the Company of Merchant 

 Adventurers fitted out an expedition of two ships, one of which was lost; in 

 1594 and again in 1596 Willem Barentz of Holland made two attempts at 

 the northwest passage, the latter being financed by the city of Amsterdam ; and 

 in the later years of the sixteenth century John Davys and Thomas James, 

 Englishmen both, south the north, James being backed by the government. 

 It was at one time "an association of English gentlemen" and at another time 

 the Dutch East India Company that assisted Henry Hudson's ill-fated en- 



