V.] THE SEA AT THE POLE OCCASIONALLY NAVIGABLE. 265 
by the sea-worm was found on the coasts of the Polar 
lands, &c.^ 
When Wood failed, he abandoned the views he had before 
maintained, declaring that the statements on which he had 
founded his plans were downright lies and delusions. But the 
belief in a polar sea that is occasionally navigable is not yet 
given up. It has since then been maintained by such men as 
Daines Barrington,2 Ferdinand von Wrangel, Augustus 
Petermann,^ and others. Along with nearly all Polar travellers 
of the present day, I had long been of an opposite opinion, 
believing the Polar Sea to be constantly covered with im¬ 
penetrable masses of ice, continuous or broken up, but I have 
come to entertain other views' since in the course of two 
winterings—the first in 79°53', that is to say, nearer the Pole 
than any other has wintered in the old world, the second in 
the neighbourhood of the Asiatic Pole of cold—I have seen that 
the sea does not freeze completely, even in the immediate 
As we know that these colossal inhabitants of the Polar Sea do not swim 
from one ice-ocean to the other across the equator, this observation must 
be considered very important, especially at a time when the question 
whether Asia and America are connected across the Pole was yet unsettled. 
Witsen also enumerates, at p. 900, several occasions on which stone 
harpoons were found in the skins of whales caught in the North 
Atlantic. These harpoons, however, may as well be derived from the 
wild races, unacquainted with iron, at Davis Strait, as from tribes living 
on the north part of the Pacific. At Kamschatka, too, long before whale¬ 
fishing by Europeans began in Behring’s Sea, harpoons marked with Latin 
letters were found in whales (Steller, Beschreihung von dem Lande 
Kamtschatha, Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1774, p. 102), 
1 The account of Wood’s voyage was printed in London in 1694 by 
Smith and Walford, printers to the Royal Society (according to a state¬ 
ment by Barrington, The possihility of approaching the North Pole asserted, 
2nd Edition, London, 1818, p. 34). I have only had an opportunity of 
^ seeing extracts from the account of this voyage in Harris and others 
^ Barrington published a number of papers on this question, which are 
collected in the work whose title is given above, of which there were two 
editions. 
^ At several places in his Mittheilungen, 1855-79. 
