Category: Travel Writing
Various routes between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans described--Advantages of a North-West Passage, if practicable--What is to be gained from further Arctic exploration--What zoology would gain--The problem of the migration of birds--About the Knots--Boundaries of the North...
Various routes between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans described--Advantages of a North-West Passage, if practicable--What is to be gained from further Arctic exploration--What...
2. CHAPTER II.An imaginary voyage--View of the Greenland coast--A splendid picture of land and sea--The winter night and its atmospheric phenomena--The aurora borealis described--Its peculiar...
3. CHAPTER III.The Polar seas--Formation of icebergs--Their dimensions and appearance--Description of colossal bergs--Their danger to navigation--Adventures with bergs--Quotations from various...
4. CHAPTER IV.The formation of snow described--Snow-crystals--Effects of the crystallizing force--Ice-flowers--Sir David Brewster’s experiment with polarised light--Regelation and moulding of...
5. CHAPTER V.Red snow, what is it?--First forms of vegetable life--The lichens, their variety--Reindeer moss--Rock-hair--Rock tripe, or _tripe de roche_--Used as food--Iceland moss and its p...
6. CHAPTER VI.Iceland, its extent--Its history--Its volcanoes--Hekla and its eruptions--Eruption of the Skaptá Jokul--The geysers, or boiling springs--Their phenomena described--Account of th...
7. CHAPTER VII.The land of the Eskimos--Range of the so-called Arctic Highlanders--Danish settlements in Greenland--Upernavik described--Jacobshav’n--Godhav’n--Their Eskimo inhabitants--The Mo...
8. CHAPTER VIII.Lapland, its divisions, extent, and boundaries--Its climate--Its inhabitants--Their physical characteristics--Dress of the Lapps--Their superstitions--The Mountain Lapps--Their...
9. CHAPTER IX.The Samojedes--Their degrading superstitions--Samojede idol at Waigatz--The _Tadebtsios_, or spirits--Influence of the _Tadibe_, or sorcerer--His mode of incantation--Customs of...
10. CHAPTER X.History of Discovery in the Arctic Regions--Expeditions of Thorne and Hore--Of Sir Hugh Willoughby--Martin Frobisher and his adventures--Discoveries of Davis--Hudson, his discov...
11. CHAPTER I.As the reader knows, the Poles are the two extremities of the axis round which the Earth revolves. It is to the North Pole, and the regions surrounding it, that the following pa...
12. CHAPTER II.Let the reader fancy himself--should he be reading these pages on a warm summer’s day, the fancy will not be unpleasant!--let the reader fancy himself on board a well-found, sto...
13. CHAPTER III.Those masses of ice which, towering to a considerable elevation above the surface of the water, are carried hither and thither by the currents of the Polar Sea, are known as _Ic...
14. CHAPTER IV.As introductory to a description of the Arctic Glaciers, a few words on the formation of snow seem necessary. Briefly, it may be said that snow is the result of the crystallizat...
15. CHAPTER V.We have already pointed out that in the northernmost regions of the Arctic lands the year is divided into one prolonged and bitterly cold night of several months’ duration, and...
16. CHAPTER VI.Just within the Arctic region, but nearly on the limits of what geographers call the Atlantic Ocean, lies an island which, since its colonization in the ninth century, has not c...
17. CHAPTER VII.The land of the Eskimos is of very wide extent. From Greenland and Labrador they range over all the coasts of Arctic America to the extreme north-eastern point of Asia. Several...
18. CHAPTER VIII.Lapland, or the Land of the Lapps, which the Lapps themselves call Sameanda or Somellada, forms the north and north-eastern portions of the Scandinavian peninsula, and is divide...
19. CHAPTER IX.The Samojedes are the immediate neighbours of the Lapps. Like them, they are nomads; but they are even less civilized, and have profited less by the arduous and enthusiastic lab...
20. CHAPTER X.In the reign of Henry VIII., Dr. Robert Thorne declared that “if he had facultie to his will, the first thing he would understande, even to attempt, would be if our seas northwa...