Chap. I. INTRODUCTION. 5 



communications, was among the circumstances 

 which, combined with others, gave rise to the revival 

 of those voyages of discovery for attempting a passage 

 round the northern coast of America to the Pacific 

 Ocean, and also to another attempt to reach the 

 North Pole, by proceeding between the east coast 

 of Greenland, now freed from ice, and the west 

 coast of Spitzbergen, generally not much hampered 

 with ice. A naval officer, the narrator of one of 

 the very first of the modern expeditions, which 

 the change in the ice of the northern seas mainly 

 occasioned, opens his account of it as follows : — 



" It most opportunely occurred, in the year 1817, that 

 accounts of a change in the Polar ice particularly favourable 

 to the undertaking, were brought to England by our whale 

 ships ; and as it has generally happened in this country, that 

 some individual, more sanguine than the rest of the com- 

 munity, has, by his superior knowledge, greater exertions, or 

 more constant perseverance, succeeded in bringing a project 

 to bear, which, in less vigorous or pertinacious hands, would 

 have been suffered to die away, this favourable change 

 was turned to so good an account by an influential member 

 of the government, and whose name is inseparable from 

 northern discovery, that, in the following year, his Majesty 

 George IV., then Prince Regent, was pleased to command 

 that attempts should be made to reach the Pacific, both by 

 the western route through Baffin's Bay, and by a northern 

 course across the Pole." * 



It would be ridiculously squeamish to affect 

 ignorance to whom the compliment in the above 

 passage is meant to apply, and the more so as, on 

 * Beechey's Voyage towards the North Pole. 



