INTRODUCTION 



was not to be found northward. But, besides this, Baron 

 Wrangel and others bring a legend from Siberia that the 

 Onkilons, when hard pressed by incoming tribes from the south, 

 emigrated to the New Siberian Islands, and from thence to the 

 land northwards. The tribe was numerous, according to the 

 legend, as numerous as " the stars of an Arctic night," and they 

 are supposed to have left for land to 

 the north in umiaks. 



But no one had tried to solve the 

 question of land or no land after 

 Captain Collingson's unsuccessful 

 attempt to sledge over the ice, and 

 only now and again was the problem 

 revived in scientific journals. 



In the beginning of the seventies 

 land was said to have been seen from 

 the whaling bark Stamboul, of New 

 Bedford, while between Harrison 

 and Camden Bay. Its captain, Mr. 

 Keenan, and all the men on board 

 the vessel saw the land plainly, and 

 for a long time it was much talked 

 of among whalers. Now, however, 

 they mostly seem to discredit its 

 existence, while none of those who 

 were on board the Stamboul at the 

 time are to be found. But as we 

 proved deep water where the men 

 from the Stamboul claimed to have 

 seen land, there is little doubt but that they must have 

 been mistaken, the more so as a piece of old ice seen at 

 a distance, with the sun behind it, looks very much like 

 land. 



Captain Hovgaard, of the Royal Danish Navy, held some 

 theories as to the existence of land north of Siberia, theories 

 which were built to a large extent on the drift of the Jeanette. 

 Captain Hovgaard wanted to reach the North Pole by going 

 over to this hypothetical land and following its shore to the 

 north. An expedition which he commanded in 1883 got beset 

 in the ice in the Kara Sea, where the vessel sustained several 



JOE CARROL. 



