CHAPTER IV 



CAPTAIN KLINKENBERG SEA WOLF AND DISCOVERER 



Although I was now myself an arctic explorer, I was 

 ill grounded in the craft, whether theoretically or prac- 

 tically. As I have said, my plan for two years had been 

 to go to Africa, and for those two years I had been im- 

 mersed in books about the tropics. I did not even know 

 the names of some of the most famous arctic explorers, 

 and it is, therefore, not particularly strange that I had 

 never heard of Captain Roald Amundsen, though he is 

 now famous. I found him and his ship, the Gjoa, in the 

 harbor at Herschel Island. 



Although the Northwest Passage had been discovered 

 in 1847 by Sir John Franklin and re-discovered by Mc- 

 Clure in 1850, and although ships had navigated the en- 

 tire distance, no ship had yet gone the whole way in the 

 same direction. Sir John Franklin's ships had come from 

 the Atlantic side, had attained a certain point on the north 

 coast of North America, and had been wrecked there. A 

 few years later Captain Collinson's ship had come from 

 the Pacific around Alaska and had proceeded far enough 

 east to overlap handsomely Franklin's track. Had Col- 

 linson wanted to proceed east to England that year, he 

 could doubtless have done so, for where Franklin had 

 preceded him with ships drawing over twenty feet of 

 water, Collinson could have won through with the same 

 type of ship. He was, however, bent on an errand of a 

 different sort and his purpose took him back west again. 



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