OBJECTS AND RESULTS OF POLAR RESEARCH. 635 

 OBJECTS AND RESULTS OF POLAR RESEARCH. 



BY GEOEG GEKLAND 



T EAVING out of view the commercial enterprises of the an- 

 -" cient inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula and the voyages 

 of the primitive Celtic people of Britain, the earliest explorer of 

 the north was a younger contemporary of Alexander the Great, 

 Pytheas of Marsilia, who braved the perils of that region, im- 

 pelled by purely scientific motives. He returned with abundant 

 results, but was not understood by the people of his time, and 

 more than two thousand years elapsed before men sailed north 

 again in scientific inquiry. It is true that many voyages were 

 made to the north during the middle ages. The Northmen dur- 

 ing that period founded colonies in Greenland, in the farthest 

 north, as their countrymen settled in the fair southern regions of 

 Apulia and Sicily ; but both sets of settlements failed to be of 

 permanent establishment. The voyage of the Venetian Zeno to 

 the Faro Islands in 1390 was without historical significance, and 

 the voyage of Christopher Columbus beyond Iceland in 1477 is 

 mythical. 



At the close of the middle ages, when the deficiency of knowl- 

 edge of the earth was great, avarice and the quest for the goods 

 of the south led men into the northern ice ; they sought to reach 

 India by the shortest possible routes, where they would not meet 

 rivals and enemies. This was the object of Magellan's circum- 

 navigation. The Ceterum Censeo of James Lancaster asserted 

 that the way to India was north, around America. India was the 

 object of the polar navigators Cabot in the fifteenth, Frobisher 

 and Davis in the sixteenth, and Hudson and Baffin in the seven- 

 teenth centuries, to name only a few of the most famous. It is 

 astonishing what these daring British and Dutch sailors risked, 

 suffered, and gained. 



They did not, indeed, reach India, but we all know of Hudson 

 Bay, Davis Strait, and Lancaster Sound. As we owe to the men 

 of the stone age, who lived before all history, one of the most 

 important possessions of man, the great paths they marked out 

 upon the earth across streams, over mountains, and through wil- 

 derness and plain, which are still the routes of to-day's highways, 

 so these older arctic navigators mapped out the courses of their 

 successors. The ships of the whalers and seal hunters followed 

 them, discovering one bay, island, and channel after another, 

 naming them and marking them on maps. 



In the seventeenth century appeared such men as Kepler, Cas- 

 sini, Newton, and Boyle. The shape of the earth was actively 

 discussed, improved maps were made, and new aims and motives 



