264 
THK VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
Greenland ship that summer) told him, that their ship went 
not out to fish that summer, but only to take in the lading of 
the whole fleet, to bring it to an early market. But, said he, 
before the fleet had caught fish enough to lade us, we, by order 
of the Greenland Company, sailed unto the north pole and hack 
again. Whereupon (his relation being novel to me) I entered 
into discourse with him, and seemed to question the truth of 
what he said; but he did ensure me it was true, and that the 
ship was then in Amsterdam, and many of the seamen 
belonging to her to justify the truth of it; and told me, moreover, 
that they had sailed two degrees beyond the pole. I asked him 
if they found no land or islands about the pole ? 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.” ^ 
In addition to these stories there were several contributions 
to a solution of the problem, which Wood himself collected, as 
a statement by Captain Goulden, who had made thirty voyages 
to Spitzbergen, that two Dutchmen had penetrated eastward 
of that group of islands to 89° N.L.; the observation that 
on the coast of Corea whales had been caught with European 
harpoons in them;^ and that driftwood eaten to the heart 
1 In more recent times the whalers have been more modest in their 
statements about high northern latitudes reached. Thus a Dutchman 
who had gone whale-fishing for twenty-two years, at an accidental 
meeting with Tschitschagoff in Bell Sound in the year 1766, stated among 
other things that he himself had once been in 81°, but that he heard that 
other whalers had been in 83° and had seen land over the ice. He had 
seen the east coast of Greenland (Spitzbergen) only once in 75° N. L. 
(Herrn von Tschitschagofi Russisch-kaiserlichen Admirals Reise nach dem 
Eissmeer, Sfc. Petersburg, 1793, p. 83). Dutch shipmasters too, who in the 
beginning of the seventeenth century penetrated north of Spitzbergen to 
82°, said that they had thence seen land towards the north (Mtiller, 
Geschiedenis der Noordsche Comfagnie, p. 180). 
2 Witsen states, p. 43, that he had conversed with a Dutch seaman, 
Benedictus Klerk, who had formerly served on board a whaler, and after¬ 
wards been a prisoner in Corea. He had asserted that in whales that were 
killed on the coast of that country he had found Dutch harpoons. The 
Dutch then carried on whale-fishing only in the north part of the Atlantic. 
They?n<7 thus shows that whales can swim from one ocean to the other. 
