454 MELVILLE — REMARKS ON POLAR EXPEDITION. [Oct. 29, 



for US to form ideas of the past history of the globe which we would 

 not have been able to form had not man gone out to explore these 

 regions. 



1 hope to see new expeditions start soon again for these regions, 

 and I trust that especially this great nation will take an important 

 part in them. We know from what you have accomplished in the 

 past that you will be able to achieve great results to the benefit of 

 the nation and to the benefit of humanity. 



Commodore George W. Melville : 



It is with a great deal of diffidence that I arise to speak at all in 

 discussion of so clever a discourse as that of Dr. Nansen, much less 

 to criticise it, for my experience in three different Arctic voyages, in 

 different Arctic seas, has taught me that only those who are in the 

 same field at about the same period can have the requisite informa- 

 tion to undertake a critical discussion. Moreover, Dr. Nansen's 

 experience with respect to ice conditions, its formation, drift and 

 other phenomena, so fully agrees with my own in the Jeannette, 

 that there is no room for argument. 



However, my sojourn of twenty-two months in a drifting pack of 

 no mean proportions, extending from the Pole south to 70°, em- 

 boldens me to speak of some experiences, second only to those of 

 Dr. Nansen and of Weyprecht and Payer of the Tegethoff expedi- 

 tion of 1 871 to 1874. 



The Jeannette, Capt. De Long, U. S. N., was boldly pushed into 

 the ice in latitude 71° 35' N., 175° W., as we then believed the theory 

 of Dr. Petermann, the celebrated German geographer, that Wrangel 

 Island m.ight be of continental proportions, extending to the north- 

 ward and eastward toward the Pole, and possibly extending so far 

 to the eastward as to overlap the northern part of Greenland. It 

 was thought to be what some explorers had supposed to be land 

 seen to the northward of the Spitzbergen, and extending as far to 

 the eastward as the archipelago formed by the Spitzbergen on 

 the west and Franz-Josef Land on the east. 



It took us but a few days to prove that Wrangel Land was only 

 an insignificant island, as we drifted across its northern face, at 

 times in as little as thirteen fathoms of water; and at times as close 

 as fifteen or twenty miles to its northern shores. 



It is needless to state that drifting in a heaving pack in so shallow 



