v.] THE SEA AT THE POLE OCCASIONALLY NAVIGABLE. 203 



In additiou to these stories there were several contributions 

 to a solution of the problem, which Wood himself collected, as 

 a statement by Captain Goulden, who had made thirty voyages 

 to Spitzbergen, that two Dutchmen had penetrated eastward 

 of that group of islands to 89" N.L. ; the observation that 

 on the coast of Corea whales had been caught with European 

 harpoons in them;^ and that driftwood eaten to the heart 

 by the sea-worm was found on the coasts of the Polar 

 lands, &C.2 



When Wood failed, he abandoned the views he had before 

 maintained, declaring that the statements on which he had 

 founded his plans were downright lies and delusions. But the 

 belief in a polar sea that is occasionally navigable is not yet 

 given up. It has since then been maintained by such men as 

 Daines Baerington,3 Ferdinand von Wrangel, Augustus 

 Peteemann,'^ and others. Along with nearly all Polar travellers 

 of the present day, I had long been of an opposite opinion, 

 beheving the Polar Sea to be constantly covered with im- 

 penetrable masses of ice, continuous or broken up, but I have 

 come to entertain other views since in the course of two 



(Herrn von Tschitschagoff Russisch-kaiserlichen Admirals Reise nach dem 

 Eissme.er, St. Petersburg, 1793, p. 83). Dutch shipmasters too, who in the 

 beginning of the seventeenth century penetrated north of Spitzbergen to 

 82°, said that they had thence seen land towards the north (Milller, 

 Geschiedenis der Noordsche Compagnie, p. 180). 



^ Witsen states, p. 43, that he had conversed with a Dutch seaman, 

 Benedictus Klerk, who had formerly served on board a whaler, and after- 

 wards been a prisoner in Corea. He had asserted that in whales that were 

 killed on the coast of that country he had found Dutch harpoons. The 

 Dutch then carried on whale-fishing only in the north part of the Atlantic. 

 The ^»f7 thus shows that whales can swim from one ocean to the other. 

 As we know that these colossal inhabitants of the Polar Sea do not swim 

 from one ice-ocean to the other across the equator, this observation must 

 be considered very important, especially at a time when the question 

 whether Asia and America are connected across the Pole was yet unsettled. 

 Witsen also enumerates, at p. 900, several occasions on which stone 

 harpoons were found in the skins of whales caught in the North 

 Atlantic, These harpoons, however, may as well be derived from the 

 wild races, unacquainted with iron, at Davis Strait, as from tribes living 

 on the north part of the Pacific. At Kamschatka, too, long before whale- 

 fishing by Europeans began in Behring's Sea, harpoons marked with Latin 

 letters were found in whales (Steller, Besclireihung von dem Lande 

 Kamtschatka, Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1774, p. 102). 



2 The account of Wood's voyage was printed in London in 1694 by 

 Smith and Walford, printers to the Royal Society (according to a state- 

 ment by Barrington, The poss'ihility of approaching the North Pole asserted, 

 2nd Edition, London, 1818, p. 34). I have only had an opportunity of 

 seeing extracts from the account of this voyage in Harris and others. 



^ Barrington published a number of papers on this question, which are 

 collected in the work whose title is given above, of which there were tv o 

 editions. 



■* At several places in his Mittheilungen, 1855-79. 



