CHAPTER XLI 
KOOLEMANS BEYNEN AND THE VOYAGES OF THE WILL EM 
BARENTSZ. SIR MARTIN CONWAY AND SPITSBERGEN. 
CAPTAIN BERNIER AND CANADIAN ARCTIC LANDS 
The voyages of Sir Allen Young in the Pandora 
had as one result the training of the character of an 
enthusiastic young Arctic navigator whose brief career 
was so brilliant and impressive that no Arctic history 
would be complete without some account of it. 
Laurens Rijnhart Koolemans Beynen was born at 
the Hague on the nth March 1852, and became a mid- 
shipman in the Royal Dutch Navy in 1871. He saw 
service in the North Sea, on the coast of Guinea, and in 
Sumatra, returning home and obtaining his Lieutenant's 
commission in 1874. Beynen had read much of the 
former glories of the Dutch navy, and had thought 
over the possibility of restoring them. He felt that, 
owing to exclusive steamer service in well-known seas, 
and to enervating work in the Indian Archipelago, 
Dutch seamen had lost much of their skill and spirit. 
He therefore desired to see new fields of enterprise 
occupied by his seafaring countrymen, to serve as a 
counterpoise to the less instructive service in the Dutch 
Indies. Above all, he considered voyages of discovery 
in the Arctic seas to be the most fitted to call forth a 
new spirit among Dutch seamen. Full of these ideas 
young Beynen called upon Commodore Jansen, with 
whom he was not previously acquainted, as the officer 
who was most likely to sympathise with them 1 . It so 
1 Commodore Jansen was one of the most active and accomplished 
of the honorary corresponding members of our Royal Geographical Society 
of his time and the chief promoter of the revival of Arctic voyages 
in Holland. He saw much service in the Royal Dutch Navy, joining 
its surveying branch, and was for several years engaged on a survey in 
the Riouw Archipelago, the Straits of Sunda, and elsewhere. As a Lieu- 
tenant on board the frigate Prins van Oranje he served in the West Indies, 
and during a visit to Washington in 1851 formed a life-long friendship 
for Maury, the great American hydrographer. He contributed the chapter 
on land and sea breezes to Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea and 
