North Polar Exploration. 333 



81° or 82°, or even 83°,* as the position of the Polar pack 

 varied in the different seasons. When the idea of an expedi- 

 tion to the North Pole was again mooted in the -last century, 

 Mr. Daines Barrington, a Fellow of the Poyal Society, with 

 great industry and perseverance, collected a number of stories 

 of whalers having frequently attained incredibly high latitudes, 

 and as these fables have since been brought forward as argu- 

 ments in favour of a Spitzbergen route to the Pole, it will be 

 as well to examine what they are really worth. 



The most marvellous of all is that told by Master Joseph 

 Moxon, hydrographer to the King's most excellent Majesty, 

 in 1697. He got most outrageously chaffed by some merry 

 Dutch sailors in a beer-shop at Amsterdam, and gravely pub- 

 lished what he had been told,f expecting every " sober, ingeni- 

 ous man" to believe it. Scoresby has pointed out that the 

 instances of voyages having been performed beyond 84°, are 

 in no case given from the direct communications of the 

 voyagers themselves, and he therefore infers that no reliance 

 whatever is to be placed upon these extraordinary instances. J 

 Moreover, he finds that nearly all the cases of ships having* 

 sailed as far as 82° and 83°, were either given from memory, 

 at a distance of eighteen to thirty years from the time when 

 the alleged voyages were made, or at second-hand. But the 

 strongest proof of the small reliance to be placed on the 

 observations of these whaling captains is to be found in the 

 statements of Captains Eobinson, Clarke, and Bateson, who 

 declared they reached 81° 16', 81° 30', and 82° 15', with open 

 water before them, in the very year, and in the same longitude 

 that Captain Phipps was stopped in 80° 48' N., by a continued 

 smooth, unbroken plain of ice extending to the horizon. 



* Parry thought that a vessel might have reached to 83° N . in 1827. 



f A Brief Discourse of a Passage hy the North Pole to Japan and China. 

 ~By Joseph Moxon, F.R.S., Hydrographer to the King's most excellent Majesty 

 (2nd edition). London, printed by J. Moxon, and sold at his shop at the Atlas 

 in Warwick Lane, 1697. 



He says, " About 22 years ago, being in Amsterdam, I went into a drinking 

 house to drink a cup of beer for my thirst, and sitting by the public fire among 

 several people, there happened a seaman to come in, who, seeing a friend of his 

 there who he knew went in the Greenland voyage, wondered to see him, because it 

 ■was not yet time for the Greenland fleet to come home. His friend, who was a 

 steersman, said that his ship sailed into the North Pole and came back again. I 

 entered into discourse with him, and he did assure me it was true ; and told me, 

 moreover, that they sailed two degrees beyond the Pole. I asked him if he found 

 no islands or lands about the Pole, and he told me no, there was a free and open 

 sea. I asked him if they did not meet with a great deal of ice. He told me no, 

 they saw no ice. I asked him what weather they had there. He told me fine 

 •warm weather, such as was at Amsterdam in the summer time, and as hot. I 

 should have asked him more questions, but he was engaged in discourse with his 

 friend, and I could not in modesty interrupt them further. I believe he spoke 

 truth, for he seemed a plain, honest, and unaffectatious person." 



% Scoresby's Arctic Regions, i. p. 42. 



