86 DISCOVERY CH. 



Captain James Cook, whose energy and steadfastness of 

 purpose, joined to his mastery of every detail of his 

 profession, enabled him to carry through the journeys 

 which elucidated the questions as to the amount and 

 extent of the lands in the Southern Ocean, the answer 

 to which had eluded many less competent and persever- 

 ing explorers. Cook was the first to take scientific 

 preventative measures against scurvy the disease 

 which had wrecked the hopes of many intrepid seamen 

 and for his splendid work in this direction he was elected 

 a Fellow of the Royal Society a distinction attained by 

 few geographical explorers. 



In modern times the spirit of scientific exploration is 

 best exemplified in the work of Fridtjof Nansen. In 

 June, 1881, an American exploring ship called the 

 Jeanette foundered in the Arctic at a point north of the 

 New Siberian Islands. Three years later a number of 

 articles which had belonged to the ship were found on 

 the south-west coast of Greenland, having been carried 

 from one side of the Arctic regions to the other by 

 drifting ice. From an examination of the facts relating 

 to this, and one or two similar instances of a similar 

 character, Dr. Nansen arrived at the conclusion, in 1891, 

 that " a current flows at some point between the pole 

 and Franz Josef Land from the Siberian Arctic Sea to 

 the east coast of Greenland." He determined, therefore, 

 to organise an Arctic expedition upon the basis of his 

 conclusion. A strong ship was to be built on such 

 principles as to enable it to withstand the pressure of 

 the ice, and was then to be taken up to the Siberian 

 Islands where the Jeanette foundered, and moored be- 

 tween suitable ice-floes in the hope and conviction that 

 she would be carried to the other side of the North Pole. 



The suggestion met with little encouragement from 



