20 TRANSACTIONS iSqQ-'oO 



whole page of history, none with a record altogether so blameless, 

 none so wise, none so human." 



Goldwin Smith in his latest historical work "The United 

 Kingdom, a Political History," marvellous as a brilliant specimen 

 of "picekd and packed words" says : 



"Made ubiquitous by his command of the sea which the 

 English had now resigned, pouncing where he was least expected, 

 sweeping the country before the national levies could be got to- 

 gether and at last keeping permanent hold upon large districts, 

 the Dane had brought the English kingdom to the verge of de- 

 struction when a heroic deliverer arose in the person of Alfred, 

 the model man of the English race. Round the head of Alfred a 

 halo has gathered ; his history is panegyric ; yet there can be no 

 doubt of his greatness as a saviour of his nation in war, as a re- 

 organizer of its institutions of which pious fable has made him 

 the founder, as a restorer of its learning and civilization. 



In the development of his wide-reaching aims, he became the 

 founder of the science of geography in England and sent out 

 Othere, a Norwegian sea captain, on a voyage of exploration in the 

 course of which he discovered, about 890 A. D., the White Sea, 

 so named because of its proximity to sterile regions white with 

 driven snow and dazzling ice.-'' 



Thus early did England become associated with circum-polar 

 seas. 



About 876 an Icelandic wanderer, Gunnbjornf by name, 

 blown out of his course by a blizzard like those which worry the 

 hfe out of the people of Nebraska, Dakota and Minnesota, was 

 compelled to pass the winter ice-blocked in an inlet of an unknown 

 land. He and his crew, released by the welcome forces of sum- 

 mer, returned to tell to wondering friends the tale of their residence 

 in the "thrilhng regions of thick-ribbed ice." 



*C. King- Alfred's account of the voyag-es of Othere and Wulfstan in his 

 adaption of the universal history of Orosius. The King's account is given as 

 he heard the voyages recounted by the adventurers themselves. 



tWe have on our charts in a very mutilated form a place-name com- 

 memorative of Gunnbjorn in Gomberg Scheer (Gunnbjorn's Skerry) nowadays 

 a dangerous reef away up north— in his time a true skerry before a seismic 

 disturbance blew it into flinders. (See Kipling's "Lights of England" fpr 

 " Skerry.") 



