. THE VARIOUS EXPEDITIONS. 113 



of the Old World, that traversing and charting of the 

 coast which showed the existence of the passage, but 

 not the nautical utilization of it. This is the European 

 interpretation of this question. In any other sense 

 McOlure did not discover the Northwest passage. If it is 

 permissible to speak of the discovery of the Northeast 

 passage after the time of Bering and the Great Northern 

 Expedition, it is equally permissible to speak of the 

 discovery of the Northwest passage after the time of the 

 great English expeditions. If some future Nordenskjold 

 should take it into his head to choose these waters as 

 the scene of some great nautical achievement, McClure, 

 according to Prof. Fries's historical maxims, could not 

 even find a place in the history of this passage, for it 

 was not his object to sail a ship around the north of 

 the New World. I very much doubt, however, that the 

 Professor would in such a case have the courage to 

 apply his maxims. 



Nor does Baron Nordenskjold concede to the Great 

 Northern Expedition a place in the history of the North- 

 east passage. The ^'Voyage of the Vega" is an imposing 

 work, and was written for a large public, but even the 

 author of this work has not been able to rise to an 

 unbiased and just estimate of his most important pre- 

 decessors. His presentation of the subject of Eussian 

 explorations in the Arctic regions, not alone Bering^s 

 work and that of the Great Northern Expedition, but 

 also . Wrangell's, Liitke's, and Von Baer's, is unfair, 

 unsatisfactory, inaccurate, and hence misleading in 

 many respects. Nordenskj oleics book comes with such 

 overpowering authority, and has had such a large 



