PART III.

THE PROGRESS OF MARITIME DISCOVERY.

CHAP. XXIII.

Maritime Discoveries of the Phœnicians.--Expedition of Hanno.--Circumnavigation of Africa under the Pharaoh Necho.--Colæus of Samos.--Pytheas of Massilia.--Expedition of Nearchus.--Circumnavigation of Hindostan under the Ptolemies.--Voyages of Discovery of the Romans.--Consequences of the Fall of the Roman Empire.--Amalfi.--Pisa.--Venice.--Genoa.--Resumption of Maritime Intercourse between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.--Discovery of the Mariner's Compass.--Marco Polo.

Among the nations of antiquity, navigation, as may well be supposed, was in a very rude and imperfect state. Unacquainted with the mariner's compass, which during the darkest and most tempestuous nights safely leads the modern seaman over the pathless ocean, the sparkling constellations of a serene sky, or the position of the sun, were the only guides of the ancient navigator. He therefore rarely ventured to lose sight of land, but cautiously steering his little bark along the shore, was subject to all the delays and dangers of coast navigation. Even under the mild sky and in the calm waters of the Mediterranean, it was only during the summer months that he dared to leave the port; to brave the fury of the wintry winds was a boldness he never could have thought of. Under such adverse circumstances, it is surely far less astonishing that the geographical knowledge of the ancients was so extremely limited when compared with ours, than that with means so scanty they yet should have known so much of the boundaries of ocean.

But the spirit of commercial enterprise triumphs over every difficulty. Stimulated by the love of gain, and the hope of discovering new sources of wealth, the Phœnicians, the first great maritime nation mentioned in history, were continually enlarging the limits of the known earth, until the fatal moment when the sword of the conqueror destroyed their cities, and extinguished their power for ever.

The first periods of Phœnician greatness are veiled in the mysterious darkness of an unknown past, yet so much is certain, that their date must have been very remote; as, according to the accounts which Herodotus received from the priests, the foundation of Tyre took place thirty centuries before the Christian era.

Long before the expedition of the Argonauts, the Phœnicians had already founded colonies on the Bithynian coast of the Black Sea (Pronectus, Bithynium); and that at a very early time they must have steered through the Straits of Grades into the Atlantic is proved by the fact, that, as far back as the eleventh century before Christ, they founded the towns of Grades and Tartessus on the western coast of Southern Spain. Penetrating farther and farther to the north, they discovered Britain, where they established their chief station on the Scilly Isles, at present so insignificant and obscure, and even visited the barbarous shores of the Baltic in quest of the costly amber. They planted their colonies along the north-west coast of Africa, even beyond the tropic; and, 2000 years before Vasco de Gama, Phœnician mariners are said to have circumnavigated that continent, for Herodotus relates that a Tyrian fleet, fitted out by Necho II., Pharaoh of Egypt (611-595 B.C.), sailed from a port in the Red Sea, doubled the southern promontory of Africa, and, after a voyage of three years, returned through the Straits of Grades to the mouth of the Nile.

Less wonderful, but resting on better historical proof, is the celebrated voyage of discovery to the south which Hanno performed by command of the senate of Carthage, the greatest of all Phœnician colonies, eclipsing even the fame of Tyre itself. Sailing from Cerne, the principal Phœnician settlement on the western coast of Africa, and which was probably situated on the present island of Arguin, he reached, after a navigation of seventeen days, a promontory which he called the West Horn (probably Cape Palmas), and then advanced to another cape, to which he gave the name of South Horn, and which is manifestly Cape de Tres Puntas, only 5° north of the line. During daytime the deepest silence reigned along the newly discovered coast, but after sunset countless fires were seen burning along the banks of the rivers, and the air resounded with music and song, the black natives spending, as they still do now, the hours of the cool night in festive joy. Most likely the Canary Islands were also known to the Phœnicians, as the summit of the Peak of Teneriffe is visible from the heights of Cape Bojador.

The progress of the great mariners of old in the Indian Ocean was no less remarkable than the extension of their Atlantic discoveries. Far beyond Bab-el-Mandeb their fleets sailed to Ophir or Supara, and returned with rich cargoes of gold, silver, sandal-wood, jewels, ivory, apes, and peacocks, to the ports of Elath and Ezion-Geber at the head of the Red Sea. These costly productions of the south were then transported across the Isthmus of Suez to Rhinocolura, the nearest port on the Mediterranean, and thence to Tyre, which ultimately distributed them over the whole of the known world.

The true position of Ophir is an enigma which no learned Œdipus will ever solve. While some authorities place it on the east coast of Africa, others fix its situation somewhere on the west coast of the Indian peninsula; and Humboldt is even of opinion that the name had only a general signification, and that a voyage to Ophir meant nothing more than a commercial expedition to any part of the Indian Ocean, just as at present we speak of a voyage to the Levant or the West Indies.

But whatever Ophir may have been, it is certain that the Phœnicians carried on a considerable trade with the lands and nations beyond the Gates of the Red Sea. Their trade in the direction of the Persian Gulf was no less extensive. Through the Syrian desert, where Palmyra, their chief station or emporium, proudly rose above the surrounding sands, their caravans slowly wandered to the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, to provide Nineveh and Babylon with the costly merchandise of Sidon and Tyre. Following the course of the great Mesopotamian streams, they reached the shores of the Persian Gulf, where they owned the ports of Tylos and Aradus and the rich pearl islands of Bahrein, and, having loaded their empty camels with the produce of Iran and Arabia, returned by the same way to the shores of the Mediterranean. How far their ships may have ventured beyond the mouth of the Persian Gulf is unknown, but the researches of the learned orientalists, Gesenius, Benfey, and Lassen, render it extremely probable, that, taking advantage of the regularly changing monsoons, they sailed through the Straits of Ormus to the coast of Malabar.

The progress of the Phœnician race in the technical arts, as well as in the astronomical and mathematical sciences so highly important for the improvement of their navigation, was no less remarkable for the age in which they lived, than the vast extension of a commercial intercourse which reached from Britain to the Indus, and from the Black Sea to the Senegal. They wove the finest linen, and knew how to dye it with the most splendid purple. They were unsurpassed in the workmanship of metals, and possessed the secret of manufacturing white and coloured glass, which their caravans and ships exchanged for the produce of the north and of the south. By the invention of the alphabet, which with many other useful sciences and arts, they communicated to the Greeks and other nations with whom they traded, they no less contributed to the progress of mankind than by the humanising influence of commerce.

Thus when we consider the services which these merchant-princes of antiquity rendered to their contemporaries, wherever their flag was seen or their caravans appeared, the annihilation of the maritime power of Tyre by Alexander (332 B.C.), and the destruction of Carthage by the Romans (146 B.C.), must strike us as events calamitous to the whole human race. Had the Carthaginians, so distinguished by their commercial spirit and ardour for discovery, triumphed over the semi-barbarous Romans, who, then at least, had not yet learned to imitate the arts of plundered Greece, there is every probability that some Punic Columbus would have discovered America at least a thousand years sooner, and the world at this day be in possession of many secrets still unknown, and destined to contribute to the comforts or enjoyments of our descendants.

In the times of Homer, when the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic had long been known to the Phœnicians, the geographical knowledge of the Greeks was still circumscribed by the narrow limits of the Eastern Mediterranean and part of the Euxine, and many a century elapsed ere their ships ventured beyond the Straits of Gades. Colæus of Samos (639 B.C.) is said to have been the first seafarer of Hellenic race who sailed forth into the Atlantic, compelled by adverse winds, and was able on his return from his involuntary voyage to tell his astonished countrymen of the wondrous rising and falling of the oceanic tides. It was seventy years later before the Phoceans of Massilia, the present Marseilles, ventured to follow the path he had traced out, and to visit the Atlantic port of Tartessus.

The town of Massilia had the additional honour of reckoning among her sons the great traveller Pytheas, the Marco Polo of antiquity. This far-wandering philosopher, who lived about 330 years before Christ, had visited all the coasts of Europe, from the mouths of the Tanais or Don to the shores of Ultima Thule, which, according to Leopold von Buch, was not Iceland, nor Feroë, nor Orcadia, but the Norwegian coast. His narrative first made the Greeks acquainted with North-western Europe, and remained for a long time their only geographical guide to those hyperborean lands.

While the horizon of the Greeks was thus considerably expanding towards the regions of the setting sun, the conquests of Alexander opened to them a new world in the distant Orient. Greek navigators now for the first time unfurled their sails on the Indian Ocean. The Macedonian, desirous not only of subduing Asia but of firmly attaching it to the nations of the Mediterranean by the bonds of mutual interest, and hoping by this means to consolidate his vast conquests, sent a fleet under the command of Nearchus, from the mouths of the Indus to the head of the Persian Gulf, to establish if possible a new road for a regular commercial intercourse between India and Mesopotamia. The performance of this voyage was reckoned by the conqueror one of the most glorious events of his reign, but it may serve as a proof of the slowness of ancient navigation, that Nearchus took ten months to perform a journey which one of our steamers might easily accomplish in five days.

After the disruption of the Macedonian empire, the circle of the Greek discoveries in the Indian Ocean was widened by the enterprising spirit of the Seleucidæ and Ptolemies. Seleucus Nicator is said to have penetrated to the mouths of the Ganges, and the fleets of the Egyptian kings sailed round the peninsula of Hindostan and discovered the coasts of Taprobane or Ceylon, the spicy odours of whose cinnamon-groves are said to be wafted far out to sea, so that--

"for many a league, Pleased with the grateful scent, old Ocean smiles."

But now came the time when earth-ruling Rome called the whole civilised world her own, and her victorious eagles expanded their triumphant wings from the Red Sea to the coasts of the Northern Ocean. What discoveries might not have been expected from such a power, if the Romans had possessed but one tithe of the maritime spirit of conquered Carthage? But even this military empire contributed something to the enlargement of maritime knowledge. Under the reign of Augustus a Roman fleet sailed round the promontory of Skagen, discovered about sixteen years after the birth of Christ the Island of Fionia or Fünen, and is even supposed to have reached the entrance of the Gulf of Finland. In the year 84 A.C. Julius Agricola, the conqueror of Britain, sailed for the first time round Scotland, and discovered the Orcadian Isles.

In Pliny's time the real magnitude of the earth was still so imperfectly known that, according to the calculations of that great though rather over-credulous naturalist, Europe occupied the third part, Asia only the fourth, and Africa about the fifth, of its whole extent.

The geographer Ptolemy, who lived about the middle of the second century, under the reigns of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, describes the limits of the earth as far as they were known in his time. To the west, the coast of Africa had been explored as far as Cape Juby; and the Fortunate Islands or Hesperides, the present Canaries, rose from the ocean as the last lands towards the setting sun.

To the north discovery had reached as far as the Shetland Isles, and the promontory Perispa at the entrance of the Gulf of Finland; while on the east coast of Africa Cape Brava formed the ultimate boundary of the known world. Soon after Ptolemy's time the whole coast of Malacca (_Aurea Chersonesus_) and the Siamese Sea, as far as the Cape of Cambogia (_Notium promontorium_), was explored, and the Romans even appear to have had some knowledge of the great islands of the Indian archipelago, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo.

And yet, notwithstanding all this progress towards the East, it may well be asked whether the Phœnicians had not embraced a wider horizon than the Romans in the full zenith of their fortunes. Even though we reject the circumnavigation of Africa under Necho, and the discovery of America by Punic navigators, as not fully proved or fabulous, it is quite certain that they had explored the west coast of Africa to a much greater extent than the Romans, and extremely probable that they knew at least as much of the lands which bound the Indian Ocean. But, as from a narrow-minded mercantile policy they kept many of their discoveries profoundly secret, all knowledge of them perished with their ruin. In ancient times, when the defeat of a people too often led to its complete destruction, or at least to the extinction of its peculiar civilisation, and the difficulties of intercourse rendered the diffusion of knowledge extremely difficult and slow, it not unfrequently happened that useful discoveries were erased from the memory of mankind, a danger which, thanks to the printing-press and the steam-engine, is now no longer to be feared.

Thus a darkening or eclipse of intellectual life took place to a vast extent when the western Roman Empire succumbed to the barbarians of the North, and the bands which for centuries had united the cities of the east and west were violently sundered. Under that fatal blight Civilisation vanished from the lands which had so long been her chosen seat, only to dawn again after a long and obscure night. Commercial intercourse ceased between the sea-ports of the Mediterranean, all communication with distant countries was cut off, and the boundaries of the known earth became more and more narrow, as the ignorance of a barbarous age increased.

It is not before the beginning of the ninth century that we perceive the first glimpses of a better day in the rising fortunes of some Italian sea-ports, where favourable circumstances had given birth to liberal institutions. As early as the year 840 Amalfi possessed a considerable number of trading-vessels, and carried on a lucrative commerce with the Levant. The maritime code of this little republic regulated the commercial transactions of all the Mediterranean sea-ports; as in a later century the law-book of Wisby served as a guide to the merchants of the Baltic. A few years after its submission in 1131 to the arms of King Roger of Sicily, Amalfi was plundered by the Pisanese and almost entirely destroyed. The neglected harbour was gradually choked with sand, and the little town, which now numbers no more than 3000 inhabitants, has nothing to console it for its actual poverty but the remembrance of a glorious past. Along with Amalfi, Gaëta, Naples, and Pisa, rose to considerable eminence in commerce, though far from equalling the power and splendour of Genoa and Venice, the great republics of northern Italy.

As far back as the beginning of the sixth century, the city of the lagunes fits out a small fleet to purge the Adriatic of Istrian pirates. By a prudent course of policy she renders herself indispensable to the Byzantine court, and acquires great privileges in Constantinople. It is here she purchases the costly productions of the East, with which during the ninth and tenth centuries, she provides Northern Italy and a great part of Germany. About the beginning of the eleventh century her trade with Egypt and Syria begins to flourish, and soon raises her to the pinnacle of her power and wealth. In the year 1080 she extends her rule over Croatia and Dalmatia, and gains in 1204 considerable advantages by assisting the western crusaders in the conquest of Constantinople. Pera, numerous coast towns from the Hellespont to the Ionian Sea, a great part of the Morea, Corfu, and Candia fall to the winged lion's share, and requite the services of "blind old Dandolo." The silk manufacture is transported, as a valuable fruit of conquest, from the Morea to Venice, and becomes a new source of wealth to the Adriatic Tyre. The Euxine opens her ports to the Venetian seamen, treaties of commerce are concluded with Trebizond and Armenia, and a factory is established at Tana, at the mouth of the Don.

While thus the power of Venice rises more and more in the East, Genoa, which already in the tenth century carried on a flourishing trade, acquires by degrees the supremacy in the Western Mediterranean. The aid afforded by the republic to the Greek emperor Michael Palæologus contributes largely to the overthrow of the Latin throne of Constantinople, and opens the Bosphorus and the Black Sea to the enterprise of her merchants. The grandeur of Genoa now reaches its height; she holds fortified possession of Pera and Galata, and covers the coasts of the Crimea with her strong-holds and castles.

At a later period the Florentines appear on the scene, and assume the rank formerly held by Pisa in Mediterranean commerce. The acquisition of the sea-port of Leghorn (1421) opens the barriers of the ocean to the birthplace of Dante and Galileo.

After their deliverance from the Moorish yoke in the ninth century, a fresh and vigorous spirit begins also to animate the Catalans. They conclude treaties of commerce with Genoa and Pisa, and towards the end of the thirteenth century the ships of Barcelona are found visiting all the ports of the Mediterranean.

But in spite of the growth of trade and navigation in Italy and Spain, many years had yet to elapse after the fall of the Roman empire ere the gates of the Atlantic were once more opened to the navigators of the Mediterranean. It was not before the middle of the thirteenth century, after Seville and a great part of the Andalusian coast had been wrested from the Moors by Ferdinand of Castile, that the Italian and Catalonian seafarers, encouraged by privileges and remissions of duties, began to visit the port of Cadiz, where they met with merchants from Portugal and Biscay. Soon after, and most probably in consequence of the connexions thus formed, we find Italian ships visiting the ports of England and the Netherlands. About 1316, Genoese vessels began to carry goods to England; and somewhat later the Venetians, whose visits are not mentioned by the chroniclers before 1323.

Thus after a long interruption we see the seamen of the Mediterranean at length resuming the track to the Atlantic ports that had been struck out more than thirty centuries before by their predecessors the Phœnicians. But their voyages to the western ocean took place under circumstances much more favourable than those which had attended the men of Tyre and Carthage in their adventurous expeditions. Not only the better construction of their ships, but still more the use of the mariner's compass, for which Europe is probably indebted to the Arabs, who in their turn owed its knowledge to the Chinese, enabled them to steer more boldly into the open sea, and regardless of the bendings of the coasts to reach their journey's end by a less circuitous route. The period when the magnetic needle was first made use of by the Mediterranean navigators is not exactly known, but so much is certain that it did good service long before the time of Flavio Gioja (1302), to whom its discovery has been erroneously ascribed, though he may have introduced some improvement in the arrangement of the compass. Humboldt tells us in his "Cosmos," that in the satirical poem of Guyot de Provens, "La Bible" (1190), and in the description of Palestine by Jaques de Vitry, bishop of Ptolemais (1204-1215), the sea-compass is mentioned as a well-known instrument. Dante also speaks of the needle which points to the stars (Paradise, xii. 29); and in a nautical work by Raimundus Lullus of Majorca, written in the year 1286, we find another proof of a much earlier knowledge of the compass than before the beginning of the fourteenth century, since its use by the mariners of his time is expressly mentioned by that author.

Confidently following this unerring guide, the Catalonians sailed at an early period to the north coast of Scotland, and even preceded the Portuguese in their discoveries on the west coast of Africa, since Don Jayme Ferrer penetrated to the mouth of the Rio de Ouro as early as August 1346. About the same time the long-forgotten Canary Islands were rediscovered by the Spaniards; and at a later period (1402-1405) conquered and depopulated by some Norman adventurers, the Bethencourts.

While thus the South-European navigators unfurled their sails on the Atlantic, and gave the first impulse to the glorious discoveries that in the following century were destined to open up the ocean, and reveal its hitherto unknown greatness to mankind, the Indian Sea still remained closed to their enterprise; for though the Venetians by this time rivalled, if they did not surpass the ancient maritime greatness of the Tyrians in the Mediterranean, they did not, like them, directly fetch the rich produce of the South in their own ships from the East-African and Indian ports, but received them at second hand from the Arabian masters of Syria and Egypt.

But though no ship of theirs was ever seen in the Indian seas, through them the knowledge of the Arabian discoveries in those parts penetrated to Europe, and widely extended the knowledge of the ocean. For when the Arabs, fired by the prophetic ardour of Mahomet, suddenly emerged from the obscurity of pastoral life, and appeared as conquerors before the astonished world, the trade of the Indian Ocean fell into the hands of these new masters of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, who soon learnt to pursue it with an energy which the Romans and Persians had never known. The town of Bassora was founded by the caliph Omar on the western shore of the great stream formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, and soon emulated Alexandria herself in the greatness of its commerce. From Bassora the Arabs sailed far beyond the Siamese Gulf, which had formerly bounded European navigation. They visited the unknown ports of the Indian archipelago, and established so active a trade with Canton, that the Chinese emperor granted them the use of their own laws in that city.

This progress of the Arabs, and the vast treasures accruing to Venice from the overland Indian trade, could not fail to excite the envy of the other seafaring powers, and to call forth an increasing desire of discovering a new maritime route to the wealth-teeming regions of Southern Asia.

The wonderful narratives of the first travellers who wandered by land to the distant East likewise contributed in no small degree to foment the ardour of discovery. The most celebrated of these geographical pioneers was Marco Polo, a noble Venetian who had resided many years at the court of the Mongol ruler, Kublai Khan, and visited the most remote regions of Asia. He was the first European that ever sailed along the western shores of the Pacific, the first that told his astonished countrymen of the magnificence of Cambalu or Peking, the capital of the great kingdom of Cathay, and of the splendour of Zipanga or Japan situated on the confines of a vast ocean extending to the east. He also made more than one sea-voyage in the Indian Ocean, and to him Europe owed her first knowledge of the Moluccas, the east coast of Africa, and the island of Madagascar.

This greatest of all the mediæval travellers, who without exaggeration may be said to have enlarged the boundaries of the known earth as much as Alexander the Great, was followed by Oderich of Portenau, who travelled as far as India and China (1320-1330); by Sir John Mandeville, who visited almost all the lands described by Marco Polo; by Schildberger of Munich, who accompanied the barbarous Tamerlane on his locust expeditions; and finally by Clavigo, sent in the year 1403 by the Spanish court on an embassy to Samarcand. The truths which these bold travellers communicated to their countrymen about the riches and the commerce of the nations they had visited, as well as the fables in which their credulity or their extravagant fancy indulged, made an enormous impression on the European mind, and raised to a feverish heat the longing after those sunny lands and isles which imagination adorned with all the charms of an earthly paradise.

CHAP. XXIV.

Prince Henry of Portugal.--Discovery of Porto Santo and Madeira.--Doubling of Cape Bojador.--Discovery of the Cape Verde Islands.--Bartholomew Diaz.--Vasco de Gama.--Columbus.--His Predecessors.--Discovery of Greenland by Günnbjorn.--Bjorne Herjulfson.--Leif.--John Vaz Cortereal.--John and Sebastian Cabot.--Retrospective View of the Beginnings of English Navigation.--Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci.--Vincent Yañez Pinson.--Cortez.--Verazzani.--Cartier.--The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.

The reigning idea of a century finds always one or more eminent spirits, in whom and through whose agency the desires and hopes of thousands ripen into deeds, and are changed from dreams into realities. One of these rare and highly gifted men was Prince Henry of Portugal, a son of King John I., who made it the chief aim of his life to extend the boundaries of maritime discovery, and devoted with glowing ardour all the powers of his energetic mind, and all the influence of rank and riches to the attainment of this noble object. From the castle of Sagres near Cape St. Vincent, where, far from the court, he had fixed his residence in order to be less disturbed in his favourite studies, his eye glanced over the Atlantic, which constantly reminded him of the unknown lands which held out such brilliant prospects to the navigator who should venture to steer southwards along the African coast. The experienced seamen and learned geographers that surrounded him confirmed him in his hopes, and encouraged him to attempt the realisation of his generous ideas.

Fortunately all outward circumstances combined to favour the prince's projects. At that time Portugal was not plunged, as at present, in a state of slothful lethargy, but full of the bold and enterprising spirit which the expulsion of the Moors and long intestine wars had called to life. The geographical position of the country, bounded on every side by the dominions of a mightier neighbour, forbade all extension by land, and pointed to the ocean as the only field in which a comparatively small but spirited people could hope to reap a rich harvest of wealth and glory.

The first two ships which Prince Henry sent out on a voyage of discovery along the African coast (1412) did not reach farther than Cape Bojador, whose rocky cliffs stretching far out into the Atlantic intimidated their inexperienced commanders. Six years later (1418) Juan Gonsalez Zarco and Tristan Vaz Tejeira were intrusted with a new expedition, and sailed with express commands to double that ill-famed promontory; but a terrible gale drove them out to sea, and forced them to seek a refuge on an unknown island, to which they thankfully gave the name of Porto Santo. This discovery, though extremely unimportant in itself, served to confirm the prince in his projects, and encouraged him to send out in the following year a new expedition under the same commander, to take possession of the island.

This led to a more important discovery, for on landing on Porto Santo the attention of the Portuguese was struck by a black and prominent spot, rising above the southern horizon. To this they now directed their course, and were equally delighted and surprised to see it swell out as they approached to the ample proportions of a large island; to which, on account of the dense forests which at that time covered its verdant hill-slopes up to the very top, they gave the name of Madeira. Prince Henry immediately equipped a considerable fleet to carry a colony of his countrymen to the new land of promise, and furnished them with the vine of Cyprus, and the sugar-cane of Sicily, which throve so well on the Atlantic isle, that after a few years the produce of Madeira began to be of consequence in the trade of the mother country.

Thus the first undertakings of Prince Henry were not left unrewarded; but, besides the commercial advantages arising from the possession of Madeira, it encouraged the Portuguese navigators no longer servilely to creep along the coasts, but boldly to steer into the open sea. Thus Don Gilianez, by avoiding the shore-currents, succeeded at last in doubling the dreaded Cape Bojador (1433), and opening a new sphere to navigation. One discovery now rapidly followed another. Gonsalez and Nuño Tristan (1440-1442) penetrated as far as the Senegal; Cape de Verd was reached in 1446; and three years later, the limits of the known earth were extended as far as the islands of the same name and the Azores, those advanced sentinels in the bosom of the Atlantic. It may easily be imagined how much these successes contributed to encourage the universal ardour for discovery. Adventurers from all countries hastened to Portugal, hoping to gratify their ambition or avarice under the auspices of a prince who had already achieved so much; and even many Venetians and Genoese, who were at that time superior to all other nations in naval science, reckoned it as an honour to serve under a flag which might justly be considered as the high school of the seaman. Thus before Prince Henry closed his eyes (1463) the aim of his glorious life had been attained; for, though he did not live to see his countrymen penetrate into the Indian Ocean, yet he witnessed the mighty impulse which in a short time was to lead to that important result.

In the year 1471 the line was crossed for the first time, and the Portuguese thus detected the error of the ancients, who believed that the intolerable heat of a vertical sun rendered the equatorial regions uninhabitable by man.

Under John the Second a mighty fleet discovered the kingdoms of Benin and Congo (1484), followed the coast above 1500 miles beyond the equator, and revealed to Europe the constellations of another hemisphere.

The farther their ships penetrated to the south, the higher rose the flood tide of their hopes. As the African continent appeared sensibly to contract itself, and to bend towards the East as they proceeded, they no longer doubted that the way to the Indian Ocean would now soon be found, and give them the exclusive possession of a trade which had enriched Venice, and made that city the envy of the world. The ancient long-forgotten tale of the Phœnician circumnavigation of Africa now found belief, and Bartholomew Diaz sailed from Lisbon for the purpose of solving the important problem. The storms of an unknown ocean, the famine caused by the loss of his store-ship, and the frequent mutinies of a dispirited crew, could not stop the progress of this intrepid mariner, who, boldly advancing in the face of a thousand difficulties, at length discovered the high promontory which forms the southern extremity of Africa. But, as his weather-beaten ships were no longer able to confront the mountain-billows and furious gales foaming or roaring round that stormy headland, he was obliged, sore against his will, to give up the attempt to double the Cape of Tempests, Cabo tormentoso, as he called it, but to which the king gave the more inviting name of the Cape of Good Hope. Yet before Vasco de Gama set sail from Lisbon to accomplish the great work (1498) and win the prize to which so many navigators had gradually paved the way, the astounding intelligence had flashed through Europe that on the 12th of October, 1492, Columbus had discovered a new world in the west. The history of this most famous, and most important in its results, of all sea-voyages, is so well known that I may well refrain from entering into any details on the subject: at all events the reader will be much more interested by a short account of the intrepid navigators who, long before the great Genoese, found their way to the shores of the new continent.

While Tropical America is separated from Europe and Africa by a vast tract of intervening ocean, and even the advanced posts of the Azores and Cape de Verd Islands are far distant from the western shores of the Atlantic, Iceland and Greenland appear to us in the north as stations linking at comparatively easy distances the Old World and the New. It is, therefore, by no means surprising that the discovery of Iceland by the Norwegian _Viking_ or pirate Nadod, and the somewhat later colonisation of the island by Ingolf, in the year 875, should in the following century have led the Norsemen to the discovery of America, particularly when we consider that no people ever equalled them in daring and romantic love of adventure:

"Kings of the main their leaders brave, Their barks the dragons of the wave."

Greenland, discovered by Günnbjorn in the year 876 or 877, was indeed not colonised by the Icelanders before 983; a delay excusable enough when we consider the uninviting climate of that dreary peninsula or island, but three years after the latter date, we already find Bjorne Herjulfson undertaking a cruise from the new settlement to the south-west, and successively discovering Nantucket, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, though without making any attempts to land. Bjorne was followed about the year 1000 by Leif, a son of Erick the Red, the founder of the Greenland colony; who, sailing along the American coast as far as 41-1/2° north lat. discovered the _good Winland_, which received its name from the wild vines which Tyrker, a German who accompanied the expedition, found growing there in abundance. The fertility and mild climate of this coast, when compared with that of Labrador and Greenland, induced the discoverers to settle, and to found the first European colony on the American continent. Frequent wars with the Eskimos or Skrelingers (dwarfs), who at that time, as I have already mentioned in the fourth chapter, extended far more to the south than at present, soon however destroyed the colony; and the last account of Norman America we find in the old Scandinavian records is the mention of a ship which, in the year 1347, had sailed from Greenland to Markland (Nova Scotia) to gather wood, and was driven by a storm to Stamfjord on the west coast of Iceland. About this time also the colonies in Greenland, which until then had enjoyed a tolerable state of prosperity, decayed and ultimately perished under the blighting influence of commercial monopolies, of wars with the aborigines, and above all of the _black death_ (1347-1351), that horrible plague of the fourteenth century, which, after having depopulated Europe, vented its fury even upon those remote wilds. Thus the knowledge of the Norman discovery of America gradually faded from the memory of man, and thus also it happened that the names and deeds of Leif and Bjorne Herjulfson remained totally unknown to the southern navigators, who at that time moreover, had little intercourse with the nations of Northern Europe.

Besides his well-authenticated Norman predecessors, Columbus may possibly have had others. Traces of early Irish and Welsh discoveries are pointed out by the Northern historians, and John Vaz Cortereal, a Portuguese navigator, is said to have visited the coasts of Newfoundland some time previous to the voyages of Columbus and Cabot.

If before the first voyage of the great Genoese navigator a mighty longing to penetrate to distant countries pervaded the public mind of Europe, it may be imagined to what a feverish glow this reigning idea of the century was excited, when the wonderful accounts of the gold and enchanting beauty of Haiti spread from land to land. As in former times, half Europe had thrown itself upon the Orient to liberate the tomb of our Saviour from the tyranny of the Moslem; so now one flood of adventurers followed another to the new land of promise, which held out such glittering prospects of wealth and enjoyment. Obeying the mighty impulse, England and France now entered upon the path on which Portugal and Spain had so gloriously preceded them, and, as the fruit of this general emulation, we see after a few years the whole western shore of the great Atlantic basin drawn into the circle of the known earth.

If Columbus was undoubtedly the first discoverer of the West Indian islands (the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, 1492; Lesser Antilles, 1493; Jamaica, 1494), the honour of having preceded him on the American continent belongs to John Cabot, a Venetian merchant settled in Bristol, and to the youthful energy of his son Sebastian, since they landed on the coast of Labrador (24th June, 1497) seventeen months before the continent of Tropical America, in the delta of the Orinoco, was discovered by Columbus on his third voyage.

Thus Genoa and Venice, the great Mediterranean rivals, divide the glory of having revealed a new world to mankind, but it was ordained that the laurels of their sons should bloom under a foreign flag, and the fruits of their endeavours be reaped by other nations. For as Columbus steered into the western ocean in the service of the Spanish monarch, the Cabots were sent by Henry the Seventh of England across the Atlantic to discover a north-western passage to India. This, of course, they did not accomplish, but the discovery of Newfoundland and of the coast of America from Labrador to Virginia rewarded their efforts, and laid the foundation of Britain's colonial greatness. Their voyage is also remarkable as having been the first expedition of the kind that ever left the shores of England, which at that time held a very inferior rank among the maritime nations, and gave but taint indications of her future naval supremacy. On this occasion it may not be uninteresting to cast a retrospective glance on the modest beginnings of British navigation. In the year 1217 the first treaty of commerce was concluded with Norway, and in the beginning of the fourteenth century Bergen was the most distant port to which English vessels resorted. Soon afterwards they ventured into the Baltic, and it was not before the middle of the following century that they began to frequent some of the Castilian and Portuguese ports. Towards the end of the fifteenth century the English flag was still a stranger to the Mediterranean, and direct intercourse with the Levant only began with the sixteenth. Edward the Second, preparing for his great Scottish war, was obliged to hire five galleys from Genoa, the same town whence a few years back our giant steamers transported a whole Sardinian army to the shores of the Crimea, where centuries before the Genoese had been established as lords and masters. Such are the changes in the relative position of nations that have been brought about by the power of time!

After this short digression I return to America, where, in 1499, Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci were the first to sail along the coast of Paria. The following year was uncommonly rich in voyages of discovery, as well in the south as in the north. In the western ocean the line was first crossed by Vincent Yañez Pinson, who doubled Cape Saint Augustin, discovered the mouths of the Amazon river, and thence sailed northwards along the coast as far as the island of Trinidad, which Columbus had discovered two years before. About the same time a Portuguese fleet, sailing under the command of Pedro Alvarez Cabral to the Indian Ocean, was driven by adverse winds to the coast of the Brazils; so that, if the genius of Columbus had not evoked, as it were, America out of the waves, chance would have effected her discovery a few years later.

A third voyage, which renders the year 1500 remarkable in maritime annals, is that of Gaspar Cortereal, a son of John Vaz Cortereal whom I have already mentioned as one of the doubtful precursors of Columbus.

Hoping to realise the dream of a north-west passage to the riches of India, Gaspar appeared on the inhospitable shores of Labrador, and penetrated into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Storms and ice-drifts forced him to retreat, but firmly resolved to prosecute his design, he again set sail in the following year with two small vessels. It is supposed that on this second voyage he penetrated into Frobisher Bay, but here floating ice-masses and violent gales separated him from his companion ship, which returned alone to Portugal.

As in our times the uncertain fate of Franklin has called forth a series of heroic deeds, so the doubtful destiny of the Portuguese explorer allowed his brother Miguel no rest, whom in the following spring we find hastening with three ships on the traces of the lost Gaspar. But Miguel also disappeared for ever among the ice-fields of the north. A third brother of this high-minded family yet remained, who earnestly implored the king that he also might be allowed to go forth and seek for his missing kindred. But Emanuel steadfastly refused permission, saying that these deplorable enterprises had already cost him two of his most valuable servants, and he could afford to lose no more.

In the year 1501 Rodrigo de Bastidas sailed to the coast of Paria, and discovered the whole shore-line from Cape de Vela to the Gulf of Darien. In the year 1502 the aged Columbus, entering with youthful ardour upon his fourth and last voyage, set sail with four wretched vessels, the largest of which was only seventy tons burthen, and discovered the coast of the American continent from Cape Gracias á Dios to Porto-Bello. The east coast of Yucatan was explored in the year 1508 by Juan Diaz de Solis and Vincent Yañez Pinson, and the island of Cuba circumnavigated for the first time by Sebastian de Ocampo.

In 1512 Juan Ponce de Leon is led by his evil star to Florida, where, instead of finding as he hoped the fountain of eternal youth, he is doomed to a miserable end; and in 1517 the above-mentioned Solis sails along the coasts of the Brazils to the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, where he is killed in a conflict with the Indians. In 1518 Cordova makes his countrymen acquainted with the north and west coasts of Yucatan, and in the same year Grijalva discovers the Mexican coast from Tabasco to San Juan de Ulloa. In 1518 he is followed by the great Cortez, who lands at Vera Cruz, overthrows the empire of Montezuma after a series of exploits unparalleled in history, and renders the whole coast of Mexico far to the north subject to the Spanish crown.

The voyages of Verazzani (1523) who sailed along the coast of the United States, and of Jacques Cartier (1524) who investigated the Bay of St. Lawrence, did not indeed widely extend geographical knowledge, as these navigators, who had been sent out by Francis I., did no more than examine more closely the previous discoveries of Cabot and Cortereal; their explorations however had the result of giving France possession of Canada, and of entitling her to a share in the fisheries of Newfoundland. Thus within half a century after the ever memorable day when Columbus first landed on Guanahani, we find almost the whole eastern coast of America rising into light from the deep darkness of an unknown past.

But while the western shores of the Atlantic were thus unrolling themselves before the wondering gaze of mankind, the Indian Ocean was the scene of no less remarkable events; for in the same year (1498) that Columbus first visited the American continent, Vasco de Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope, which thus fully justified its auspicious name, crossed the Eastern Ocean, and on the 22nd of May landed at Calicut on the coast of Malabar, ten months and two days after leaving the port of Lisbon.

And now, as if by magic, the great revolution in commerce took place which the Venetians long had feared and the Portuguese had no less anxiously hoped for; for the latter lost no time in reaping the golden fruits of the glorious discoveries of Gama and his predecessors. In less than twenty years their flag waved in all the harbours of the Indian Ocean, from the east coast of Africa to Canton; and over this whole immense expanse a row of fortified stations secured to them the dominion of the seas. Their settlements in Diu and Goa awed the whole coast of Malabar, and cut off the intercourse of Egypt with India by way of the Red Sea. They took possession of the small island of Ormus, which commands the entrance of the Persian Gulf, and rendered this important commercial highway likewise tributary to their power. In the centre of the East-Indian world rose their chief emporium, Malacca, and even in distant China Macao obeyed their laws. The discovery of the Molucca Islands gave them the monopoly of the lucrative spice trade, which was destined at a later period, and more permanently, to enrich the thrifty Dutchman.

What vast changes had taken place since Prince Henry's first expeditions to the coast of Africa! How had old Ocean enlarged his bounds! He who as a child had still known the earth with her old and narrow confines might, before his hair grew white, have seen the Atlantic assume a definite form; Africa project like an enormous peninsula into the boundless world of waters, and one single ocean bathe all the coasts from Canton to the West Indies.

Yet a few years and the Pacific opens its gates, and all the discoveries of Columbus and Vasco seem small when compared with the vast regions which Magellan reveals to man.

CHAP. XXV.

Vasco Nuñez de Balboa.--His Discovery of the Pacific, and subsequent Fate.--Ferdinand Magellan.--Sebastian el Cano, the first Circumnavigator of the Globe.--Discoveries of Pizarro and Cortez.--Urdaneta.--Juan Fernandez.--Mendoza.--Drake.--Discoveries of the Portuguese and Dutch in the Western Pacific.--Attempts of the Dutch and English to discover North-East and North-West Passages to India.--Sir Hugh Willoughby and Chancellor.--Frobisher.--Davis.--Barentz.--His Wintering in Nova Zembla.--Quiros.--Torres.--Schouten.--Le Maire.--Abel Tasman.--Hudson.--Baffin.--Dampier.--Anson.--Byron.--Wallis and Carteret.--Bougainville.

The riches which the Indian trade had poured into the lap of Venice, and which at a later period fell to the share of the Portuguese, formed the chief incitement to the great maritime discoveries which illustrated the end of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century.

The hope to discover a new road to India had not only animated the Portuguese navigators, but also led Columbus and Cabot across the Atlantic. It caused the unfortunate Cortereal to sail into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, induced Juan de Solis to penetrate into the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, and was finally the chief end and aim of the wondrous expedition of Magellan. The time is now come when the barriers of the Pacific are to fall, but before crossing its vast bosom with the illustrious navigator who first traversed it from end to end, I shall detain the reader a few moments on the shores of the Gulf of Darien, where the wretched remains of the colony of Santa Maria el Antigua, founded by Ojeda in 1509, had, after the departure of that unfortunate adventurer, freely elected Vasco Nuñez de Balboa to be their governor. This great man, who would have emulated the fame of a Cortez or Pizarro if his good fortune had been equal to his merit, omitted no opportunity of justifying the choice of his comrades by the unremitting zeal he displayed for their welfare. Making up for the scantiness of his resources by unceasing activity, he subdued the neighbouring caciques, and collected a great quantity of gold, which abounded more in that part of the continent than in the islands.

It happened during one of his frequent excursions that a young Cacique, witnessing a very angry dispute among the Spaniards about a few grains of gold, asked them in a contemptuous tone why they quarrelled about such a trifle; and added, that, if they set such an exorbitant value upon a metal comparatively worthless in his eyes, he could gratify their utmost wishes by pointing out to them a land where gold was so plentiful that even common utensils were made of it. And when Balboa eagerly asked where that happy country was situated, "Six days' journey to the south," was the answer, "will bring you to another ocean along whose coast it lies!"

This was the first time the Spaniards ever heard of the Pacific and of gold-teeming Peru, and the intelligence was well calculated to inflame the enterprising spirit of their leader. Balboa immediately concluded that this sea must be that which Columbus and so many other navigators had vainly sought for, and that its discovery would beyond all doubt open the way to India, which, according to the geographical error of the times, was supposed to be far less distant from America than it really is.

The most brilliant prospects rose before his fancy, and he would immediately have gone forth to realise them, if prudence had not warned him first to provide all the means necessary to insure success. He therefore endeavoured before all to gain the good-will of the neighbouring Indian chiefs, and sent some trustworthy agents to Hispaniola with a considerable quantity of gold, whereby many adventurers were induced to flock to his standard. Having thus reinforced himself, he thought he might now safely undertake his important expedition.

The Isthmus of Darien, over which he had to force his way, is not above sixty miles broad, but this short distance was rendered difficult, or rather impervious, by the innumerable obstacles of a tropical wilderness. The high mountains running along the neck of land were covered with dense forests, and the low grounds beneath filled with deep swamps, from which arose exhalations deadly to a European constitution. Wild torrents rushed down the ravines, and often forced them to retrace their steps. A march through a country like this, thinly peopled by a few savages, and without any other guides than some Indians of doubtful fidelity, was an enterprise worthy of all the energies of a Balboa.

On the 1st of September, 1513, after the end of the rainy season, he set out with a small but well chosen band of 190 Spaniards, accompanied by 1000 Indian carriers. As long as he remained on the territories of the friendly Caciques his progress was comparatively easy, but scarce had he penetrated into the interior, when, besides the almost invincible obstacles of nature--forests, swamps, and swollen torrents,--he had to encounter the deadly enmity of the Indians. As he approached, some of the Caciques fled to the mountains, after having destroyed or carried along with them all that might have been of use to the hated strangers; while others, of more determined hostility, opposed his progress by force of arms. Although the Spaniards had been led to expect that a six days' march would bring them to their journey's end, they had already spent no less than twenty-five days in forcing their way through the wilderness, amidst incessant attacks and hardships. The greater part of them were rapidly giving way under fatigues almost surpassing the limits of mortal endurance, and even the strongest felt that they could not hold out much longer. But Balboa, ever the foremost to face danger or difficulty, whose spirits no reverse could damp, and whose fiery eloquence painted in glowing colours the glorious reward of their present privations, knew how to inspire his men with his own unconquerable spirit, so that without a murmur they kept toiling on through swamp and forest. At length the Indian guides pointed out to them a mountain-crest from which they promised them the view of the longed-for ocean. Filled with new ardour they climbed up the steep ascent, but before they reached the summit Balboa ordered them to halt, that he might be the first to enjoy the glorious prospect. As soon as he saw the Pacific stretch out in endless majesty along the verge of the distant horizon, he fell on his knees and poured forth his rapturous thanks to heaven for having awarded him so grand a discovery. And now also his impatient companions hurried on, and soon the primeval forest--accustomed only to the howlings of the brute or the eagle's scream--resounded with the loud exclamations of their astonishment, gratitude, and joy.

It was from the small mountain-chain of Quarequa, on the 25th of September, 1513, that the Spaniards first saw the sea-horizon, but they had still several days to march before they reached the Gulf of San Miguel. Here Alonzo Martin de Don Benito was the first white man that ever floated in a canoe on the Eastern Pacific, even before Balboa, armed with sword and shield, descended into the water to take possession of the newly discovered ocean in the name of the king his master.

Although the subsequent fortunes of this great man are foreign to my subject, yet it may not be uninteresting to the reader to be informed how his important services were requited. Unfortunately the ingratitude of the Spanish court, which so scandalously embittered the declining years of Columbus and Cortez, reached its lowest depth in the case of Balboa. Those great men had at least in the beginning enjoyed some show of favour, but the discoverer of the Pacific was treated throughout with the basest indignity. The governorship of Darien, to which his splendid achievements had given him so undeniable a claim, was conferred upon a certain Pedrarias Davila, a wretch who, after having persecuted and thwarted the hero in every possible way, caused him at length to be beheaded, under a false accusation of high treason.

Six years after Balboa had first seen the Pacific, two years after his execution, Ferdinand of Magellan made his appearance in that great ocean. A Portuguese of noble birth, this eminent navigator had served with distinction under Albuquerque, the conqueror of Malacca. His plan of seeking a new road to India across the Atlantic being but coldly received in his native country, he transferred his services to Spain, where his distinguished merit found better judges in Cardinal Ximenes, and his youthful master, Charles V. With five ships, the largest of which did not carry more than 120 tons, and with a crew of 236 men, partly the sweepings of the jails, he sailed on the 20th of September, 1519, from the port of San Lucar, and spent the following summer (the winter of the southern hemisphere) on the dreary coast of Patagonia. In this uncomfortable station he lost one of his squadron; and the Spaniards suffered so much from the excessive rigour of the climate, that the crews of three of his ships, headed by their officers, rose in open mutiny, and insisted on relinquishing the visionary project of a desperate adventurer, and returning directly to Spain. This dangerous insurrection Magellan suppressed by an effort of courage no less prompt than intrepid, and inflicted exemplary punishment on the ringleaders.

He now continued his journey to the south, and reached, near 53° south lat., the celebrated straits which bear his name. Here again he had to exert his full authority to induce his reluctant followers to accompany him into the unknown channel that was to lead them to an equally unknown ocean. One of his ships immediately deserted him and returned to Europe, but the others remained true to their commander, and, after having spent twenty days in winding through those dangerous straits, they at last, on the 27th of November, 1521, emerged into the open ocean, the sight of which amply repaid Magellan for all the anxieties and troubles he had undergone. They now pursued their way across the wide expanse of waters, of whose enormous extent they had no conception, and soon had to endure all the miseries of hunger and disease. But the continuous beauty of the weather, and the steady easterly wind, which, swelling the sails of Magellan, drove him straight onwards to the goal, kept up his courage; and induced him to give to the ocean which greeted him with such a friendly welcome the name of the Pacific, which it still, though undeservedly, retains. During three months and twenty days he sailed to the north-west, and, by a singular mischance, without seeing any land in those isle-teeming seas, except only two uninhabited rocks which he called the "Desventuradas," or the "Wretched." At last, after the longest journey ever made by man through the deserts of the ocean, he discovered the small but fruitful group of the Ladrones (March 6, 1521), which afforded him refreshments in such abundance, that the vigour and health of his emaciated crew was soon reestablished. From these isles, to which his gratitude might have given a more friendly name, he proceeded on his voyage, and soon made the more important discovery of the islands now known as the _Philippines_. In one of these he got into an unfortunate quarrel with the natives, who attacked him in great numbers and well-armed; and, while he fought at the head of his men with his usual valour, he fell by the hands of those barbarians, together with several of his principal officers.

Thus Magellan lost the glory of accomplishing the first circumnavigation of the globe; the performance of which now fell to the share of his companion, Sebastian El Cano, who returned to San Lucar in the "Victoria" by the Cape of Good Hope, having sailed round the globe in the space of three years and twenty-eight days.

But although Magellan did not live fully to achieve his glorious undertaking, the astonishing perseverance and ability with which he performed the chief and most difficult part of his arduous task have secured him an immortal renown. Nor has posterity been unmindful of his services, having awarded his name an imperishable place in the memory of man, both in the straits, the portal of his grand discovery, and in the "Magellanic clouds," those dense clusters of stars and nebulæ which so beautifully stud the firmament of the southern hemisphere.

After Magellan, Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, shines as a discoverer in the South Sea. The history of his memorable feats by land does not belong to this narrative, but I may well accompany him on his adventurous navigation along the unknown coast of South America, and relate the hardships he had to endure before he was enabled to reap the rewards of victory.

Soon after the execution, or rather the murder, of Balboa, Pedrarias Davila obtained permission to transfer the colony of Darien to Panama, which, although equally unhealthy, yet from its situation on the Pacific afforded greater facilities for the prosecution of discovery on the south-west coast, to which now all the hopes and plans of the Spanish gold-seekers were directed. Several expeditions left the new colony in rapid succession, but all proved unsuccessful. Their timorous leaders, none of whom had ventured beyond the dreary coasts of _Tierra firme_, gave such dismal accounts of their hardships and the wretched aspect of the countries they had seen, that the ardour for discovery was considerably damped, and the opinion began to gain ground that Balboa must have founded chimerical hopes on the idle tales of an ignorant or deceitful savage.

But there were three men in Panama, Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, and Hernando Luque, who, far from sharing the general opinion, remained fully determined to seek the unknown gold-land. Pizarro and Almagro were soldiers, Luque was a priest. They formed an association approved of by the governor, each agreeing to devote all his energies to the common interest. Pizarro, the poorest of the three, took upon himself the greater part of the hardships and dangers of the enterprise, and volunteered to command the first expedition that should be fitted out; Almagro engaged to follow him with the necessary reinforcements; and Luque, the man of peace, promised to watch in Panama over the interests of the association.

On the 14th of November, 1524, Pizarro sailed from Panama with 112 men, closely packed together in one small vessel. Unfortunately he had chosen the worst season of the year for his departure, as the periodical winds raging at the time blew quite contrary to the course he intended to pursue, and thus it happened that after seventy days he had advanced no farther to the south-east than an experienced navigator will now traverse in as many hours. During this tedious journey he landed in different parts of the coast of Tierra firme, but, finding all the previous descriptions of its inhospitable nature fully confirmed, he saw himself obliged to await the promised reinforcements in Chuchama, opposite to the Pearl Islands. Here he was soon joined by Almagro, who had suffered similar hardships, and moreover lost an eye in a fight with the Indians. But, as he had advanced farther to the south, where the country and people wore a more favourable aspect, this slight glimpse of hope encouraged the adventurers to persevere in spite of all the miseries they had endured. Almagro returned to Panama, where with the greatest difficulty he could levy fourscore men, his sufferings and those of his companions having given his countrymen a very unfavourable idea of the service.

With this small reinforcement the associates did not hesitate to renew their enterprise, and at length, after a passage no less tedious than the first, reached the Bay of Saint Matthew on the coast of Quito (1526). In Tecumez, to the south of the Emerald River, they were delighted with the aspect of a fine well-cultivated country, inhabited by a people whose clothing and dwellings indicated a higher degree of civilisation and wealth. But, not venturing to attempt its conquest with a handful of men enfeebled by fatigue and disease, they retired to the small island of Gallo, where Pizarro waited, while Almagro once more returned to Panama, hoping that the better accounts he could give of their second journey would procure reinforcements large enough for the conquest of the newly discovered countries.

But the new governor of Panama, Pedro de los Rios, interdicted all further volunteering for an enterprise he considered chimerical, and even sent a vessel to the island of Gallo to bring back Pizarro and his companions. The associates, on the other hand, were less inclined than ever to give up their enterprise, now that better prospects had opened, so that Pizarro peremptorily refused to obey the governor's commands, and used all his eloquence in persuading his men not to abandon him. But the hardships they had endured, and the prospect of soon revisiting their families and friends, pleaded so strongly against him, that when he drew a line with his sword upon the sand, and told those that wished to leave him to pass over it, only thirteen of his veterans remained true to his fortunes.

With this select band of heroes Pizarro now retired to the desert island of Gorgona, where, as it lay further from the coast, he could await with greater security the reinforcements which he trusted the zeal of his associates would soon be able to procure. Nor was he deceived, for Almagro and Luque, by their repeated solicitations, at length prevailed upon the governor to send out a small vessel to his assistance, though without one landsman on board, that he might not be encouraged to any new enterprise. Meanwhile Pizarro and his faithful "thirteen" had spent five long months on their wretched island, their eyes constantly turned to the north, until, heart-sick and despairing from hope deferred, they resolved to intrust themselves to the inconstant waves upon a miserable raft, rather than remain any longer in that dreadful wilderness. But now at last the vessel from Panama appeared, and raised them so thoroughly from the deepest despondency to the most extravagant hopes, that Pizarro easily induced not only his old friends, but also the crew of the vessel, to sail farther to the south instead of returning at once to Panama.

This time the winds were favourable, and after a voyage of twenty days they at length reached the town of Tumbez on the coast of Peru, where the magnificent temple of the sun and the palace of the Incas, with its costly golden vases, exceeded their most sanguine expectations. But once more Pizarro, too weak to attempt invasion, was obliged to content himself with the view of the riches he one day hoped to possess, and returned to Panama after an absence of three years.

Amidst interminable delays and difficulties, which, although not to be compared to those he had endured, would still have totally discouraged a mind of a less iron mould, five years more elapsed before the matchless perseverance of Pizarro met with its reward. On the 14th of April, 1531, he landed in Peru for the second time, and in a few months the empire of the Incas lay prostrate at his feet. The poor adventurer of Gorgona was now one of the richest men on earth.

From this time the stream of conquest and discovery continuously rolled on to the south, so that after a few years the whole coast of Peru and Chili, as far as the wilds of Patagonia, was either known or subject to the Spaniards.

But while Pizarro and his comrades were thus opening the south-west coast of America to the knowledge of mankind, the conqueror of Mexico was no less anxious to add to his laurels the glory of discovery in the Northern Pacific, whose shores his warriors had reached in 1521, soon after the fall of the Aztec capital. Desirous of opening a new passage to the East Indies, he fitted out a fleet (1526), which, under the command of his kinsman Alvaro de Saavedra, was to sail to the Moluccas, and most likely discovered part of the Radack and Ralick Archipelago, visited and described three centuries later by Kotzebue and Chamisso.

In the year 1536 Cortez himself undertook a maritime expedition to the north, discovered the peninsula of California, and explored the greater part of the long and narrow bay which separates it from the mainland. After the return of this great man to Spain, where, loaded with ingratitude, he died in 1547, Rodriguez Cabrillo (1543) sailed as far as Monterey, and subsequently the pilot of the expedition, Bartholomew Ferreto, reached 43° N. lat., where Vancouver's Cape Oxford is situated.

In the year 1542 Villalobos made the first attempt to establish a colony on the Philippine Islands with settlers from Mexico, but, having failed, the colonisation did not take place before 1565. The intelligence of this success was brought to America by the pilot and monk, Fray Andreas Urdaneta, who sailed on the 1st of June from Manilla and arrived on the 3rd of October in the Mexican port of Acapulco. All previous attempts to sail from Asia to America had failed, on account of the opposing trade-winds; but Urdaneta sailed northward till he encountered the favourable west wind, which carried him to the New World across the wide bosom of the Pacific. The discovery of this new ocean route was of considerable importance to the Spaniards, and, to perpetuate the memory of Urdaneta's nautical ability, they continued to call the passage by his name.

About the same time another Spanish pilot, Juan Fernandez, discovered the proper sea route from Callao to Chili, by first sailing far out to sea, and thus avoiding the coast-currents from the south. He also discovered the island which still bears his name, and has become so celebrated by the adventures of Alexander Selkirk, and the immortal tale of Daniel Defoe.

In the year 1567 an expedition sailed from Callao under Alvaro Mendana, which discovered the Solomon Islands; and in 1595 the group of the Marquesas de Mendoza was first brought to light by the same navigator. Before the last expedition of Mendana, Drake, the first circumnavigator of the globe (1577-1580) after Magellan and El Cano, penetrated into the Pacific, by rounding Cape Horn, and subsequently discovered the coasts of New Albion as far as 48° N. lat.

After having thus rapidly followed the course of the discoveries which during the sixteenth century made Europe acquainted with the whole western coast of America, from Cape Pillares in Tierra del Fuego to the mouth of the Columbia River, I return to the Indian Ocean, where in the beginning of the century we left the Portuguese in the full bloom of their power, and, to judge by the progress already made, likely to add largely to the stock of geographical knowledge. But whether the masters of the Indian Ocean had no desire to extend still farther the circle of their conquests, or the fiery spirit of enterprise which had animated Vasco de Gama and Diaz was prematurely extinguished, the discoveries of the Portuguese in the Pacific by no means corresponded to the gigantic flight which in less than a quarter of a century had led them from Cape de Verde to the extremity of the Malayan Archipelago. New Guinea was indeed discovered by Don Jorge de Menezes (1526) and Alvaro de Saavedra (1528), and some old maps prove that before 1542 a part of the coast of New Holland was known to the Portuguese, who had penetrated to the north as far as Formosa and Japan, yet at the end of the sixteenth century the western boundaries of the Pacific were only known from 40° N. lat. to 10° S. lat., and all beyond was enveloped in darkness. As little was known of the innumerable South Sea islands, for although some of the groups had been seen or visited by the Spaniards, their existence was kept secret lest other seafaring nations should be tempted to explore the wastes of the Pacific.

I have already mentioned that the desire to find a shorter route to the wealth of India was the chief inducement which led to the discoveries of Vasco de Gama, Columbus, and Magellan; this same motive also called forth the first attempts of the Dutch and English to find a northern passage to the southern seas.

In the year 1553 Sir Hugh Willoughby and Chancellor left England on their memorable voyage of Arctic discovery, and steered to the north-east. In a stormy night they parted company, never to meet again. For a long time nothing was heard of Willoughby, until some Russian sailors found on the dreary coast of Lapland two wrecks tenanted only by the dead. A note, dated January 1554, proved that then at least some of the unfortunate navigators were still alive; but this was the last and only memorial of the mysterious end of the first Britons that ever ventured into the frozen seas. Chancellor was more fortunate. After having for a long time been driven about by storms, he discovered the White Sea, and on landing heard for the first time of Russia and her sovereign the Czar Ivan Vasiliovitch, who resided in a great town called Moscow. This unknown potentate the indefatigable seaman resolved to visit in his capital, where he was graciously received, and obtained permission for his countrymen to frequent the port of Archangel. Soon after his return to England he was sent back to Russia by Queen Mary, for the purpose of settling the terms of a treaty of commerce between the two nations; and, having satisfactorily accomplished his mission, once more set sail from the White Sea, accompanied by a Muscovite ambassador. But this time the return voyage was extremely unfortunate; two of the ships, richly laden with Russian commodities, ran ashore on the coast of Norway, and Chancellor's own vessel was driven by a dreadful storm as far as Pitsligo in Scotland, in which bay it was wrecked. Chancellor endeavoured to save the ambassador and himself in a boat, but the small pinnace was upset, and, although the Russian reached the strand, the Englishman, after having escaped so many dangers in the Arctic Ocean, was doomed to an untimely end within sight of his native shores.

Twenty years afterwards, Martin Frobisher set sail with three small vessels of thirty-five, thirty, and ten tons, on no less an errand than the discovery of a north-west passage to Asia. With these wretched nut-shells he reached the coasts of Greenland and Labrador, but was prevented by the ice from effecting a landing.

This first voyage was little remarkable in itself, but its accidental results tended much to the advancement of northern research, for Frobisher brought home some glittering stones, the lustre of which was erroneously attributed to gold; a circumstance which, as may well be imagined, greatly contributed to pave the way for a second expedition to "Meta Incognita." This time Frobisher sailed with three ships, of a much larger size, that they might be able to hold more of the anticipated treasure; and, besides securing 200 tons of the imaginary gold, discovered the entrance of the strait which bears his name.

His geographical knowledge may be inferred from the fact that he firmly believed the land on one side of this channel to be Asia, and on the other America; and, though we may be tempted to smile at his ignorance, yet the lion-hearted seaman is not the less to be admired, who with such inadequate means ventured to brave the unknown terrors of the Frozen Ocean.

The gales and floating ice which greeted Frobisher as he endeavoured to force a passage through the strait put a stop to all farther progress to India; but, as the gold delusion still continued, the expedition was considered eminently successful. A large squadron of fifteen vessels was consequently fitted out for the summer of 1578, and commissioned not only to bring back an untold amount of treasure, but also to take out materials and men to establish a colony on those desolate shores.

But this grand expedition, which sailed forth with such extravagant hopes, was doomed to end in disappointment. One of the largest vessels was crushed by an iceberg at the entrance of the strait, and the others were so beaten about by storms and obstructed by fogs, that the whole summer elapsed, and they were fain to return to England without having done anything for the advancement of geographical knowledge.

The utter worthlessness of the glittering stones having meanwhile been discovered, Frobisher relinquished all further attempts to push his fortunes in the northern regions, and sought new laurels in a sunnier clime. He accompanied Drake to the West Indies, commanded subsequently one of the largest vessels opposed to the Spanish Armada, and ended his heroic life while attacking a small French fort on behalf of Henry IV., during the war with the League. He was one of those adventurous spirits always thirsting for action, and too uneasy ever to enjoy repose.

In the year 1585, John Davis, with the ships "Sunshine" and "Moonshine," carrying besides their more necessary equipments a band of music "to cheer and recreate the spirits of the natives," made his first voyage in quest of the north-west passage, and discovered the broad strait which leads into the icy deserts of Baffin's Bay. But neither in this attempt nor in his two following ones was he able to effect the object for which he strove; and these repeated failures cooled for a long time the national ardour for northern discovery.

In the year 1594 the Dutch appear upon the scene. This persevering and industrious people, which in the following century was destined to play so important a part in the politics of Europe, had just then succeeded in casting off the Spanish yoke, and was laudably endeavouring to gain by maritime enterprise a position among the neighbouring states, which the smallness of its territory seemed to deny to its ambition. All the known roads to the treasures of the south were at that time too well guarded by the jealous fleets of Spain and Portugal to admit of any rivalry; but, if fortune should favour them in finding the yet unexplored northern passage to India, they might still hope to secure a lion's share in that most lucrative of trades. Animated by the bold spirit of adventure which the dawn of independence always calls forth in a nation, a company of Amsterdam merchants fitted out an expedition of northern discovery, which it intrusted to the superintendence and pilotage of William Barentz, one of the most experienced seamen of the day.

Barentz left the Texel on the 6th of June, 1594, reached the northern extremity of Nova Zembla, and returned to Holland. Meanwhile his associate, penetrating through a strait to which he gave the very appropriate name of Waigats or "Wind-hole," battled against the floating ice of the Sea of Kara, until, rounding a promontory, he saw a blue and open sea extending before him, and the Russian coast trending away towards the south-east. He now no longer doubted that he had sailed round the famous cape "Tabis" of Pliny, an imaginary promontory which according to that erroneous guide formed the northern extremity of Asia, and whence the voyage was supposed to be short and easy to its eastern and southern shores. He had only reached the Gulf of Obi, and within the Arctic Circle the continent of Asia still stretched 120 degrees to the east; but this was then unknown, and the Dutchman, satisfied with the prospect of success, did not press onward to test its reality, but started in full sail for Holland, to rouse the sluggish fancy of his phlegmatic countrymen with chimerical hopes and golden visions.

On the receipt of this glad intelligence six large vessels were immediately fitted out, and richly laden with goods suited to the taste of the Indians. A small swift-sailing yacht was added to the squadron to bear it company as far as the imaginary promontory of Tabis, and thence to return with the good news that it had safely performed what was supposed to be the most perilous part of the voyage, and had been left steering with a favourable wind right off to India.

But, as may well be imagined, these sanguine hopes were destined to meet with a woeful disappointment, for the Wind-hole Strait, doing full justice to its name, did not allow them to pass; and, after many fruitless endeavours to force their way through the mighty ice-blocks that obstructed that inhospitable channel, they returned dejected and crest-fallen to the port whence they had sailed a few months before, elated with such brilliant expectations.

Although great disappointment was felt at this failure, the scheme however was not abandoned, and on the 16th of May, 1596, Heemskerk, Barentz, and Cornelis Ryp once more started for the north-east. Bear Island and Spitzbergen were discovered, whereupon the ships separated; Cornelis and Heemskerk returning to Holland, while Barentz, enclosed by the ice, was obliged to spend a long and dreary winter in the dreadful solitudes of Nova Zembla. Fortunately a quantity of drift-wood was found on the strand, which served the Dutchmen both for the construction of a small hut and for fuel. At the same time it raised their courage, as they now no longer doubted that Providence, which had sent them this unexpected succour in the wilderness, would guide them safely through all their difficulties. And indeed they stood in need of this consolatory belief, for as early as September the ground was frozen so hard that they tried in vain to dig a grave for a dead comrade, and their cramped fingers could hardly proceed with the building of the hut.

The attacks of the white bears also gave them great trouble. One day Barentz, from the deck of the vessel, seeing three bears stealthily approaching a party of his men who were labouring at the hut, shouted loudly to warn them of their peril, and the men, startled at the near approach of danger, sought safety in flight. One of the party, in his haste and perturbation, fell into a cleft in the ice; but the hungry animals fortunately overlooked him, and continued their pursuit of the main body. These gained the vessel and began to congratulate themselves on their safety, when, to their horror, they perceived that their foes, instead of retreating from a hopeless pursuit, were actually scaling the ship's sides, evidently determined to have their meal. Matters now became serious. One of the sailors was despatched for a light, but in his hurry and agitation could not get the match to take fire (Enfields and revolvers were then unknown), and the muskets being thus rendered useless, the sailors in despair kept their enemies off by pelting them with whatever articles came first to hand. This unequal conflict continued for some time, until a well-directed blow on the snout of the largest bear caused the _barking_[AB] monster to retire from the field followed by his two companions,

"who, seeing Hector flee, No longer dared to face the enemy."

[Footnote AB: "I did not hear them roar as ours do, but they only bark."--_Marten's Voyage to Spitzbergen._]

By the middle of October the hut was completed; and though the accommodations it afforded were extremely scanty, they were glad to take up their abode in it at once.

And now began the long, dreary, three months' night of the 77th degree of latitude, during which snow-drifts and impetuous winds confined them to their miserable dwelling. "We looked pitifully one upon the other," says Gerret De Veer, the simple narrator of the sufferings of that Arctic winter, "being in great fear that if the extremity of the cold grew to be more and more, we should all die there of cold; for that what fire soever we made would not warm us." The ice was now two inches thick upon the walls and even on the sides of their sleeping-cots, and the very clothes they wore were whitened with frost, so that as they sat together in their hut they "were all as white as the countrymen used to be when they came in at the gates of the towns in Holland with their sleads, and have gone all night."

Yet in the midst of all their sufferings these hardy men maintained brave and cheerful hearts, and so great was their elasticity of spirit that, remembering the 5th of January was "Twelfth Even," they determined to celebrate it as best they might. "And then," says the old chronicler, "we prayed our maister that we might be merry that night, and said that we were content to spend some of the wine that night which we had spared, and which was our share (one glass) every second day; and so that night we made merry and drew for king. And therewith we had two pounds of meale, whereof we made pancakes with oyle, and every man had a white biscuit, which we sopt in the wine. And so, supposing that we were in our own country, and amongst our friends, it comforted as well as if we had made a great banket in our owne house." Blessed Content! arising from a simple heart and a life of honest and healthful toil, never didst thou celebrate a greater triumph, or more forcibly show thy power, than in that dreary hut on Nova Zembla!

Some weeks afterwards the sun appeared once more above the horizon; and the glorious sight, though it soon vanished again into darkness, was a joyful one indeed, full of delightful images of a return to friends and home. Now, also, the furious gales and snow-storms ceased; and, though the severity of the cold continued unabated, they were able to brave the outer air and recruit their strength by exercise.

When summer came, it was found impossible to disengage the ice-bound vessel, and the only hopes of escaping from their dreary prison now rested on two small boats, in which they ventured on the capricious ocean. On the fourth day of their voyage, their fragile barks became surrounded by immense quantities of floating ice, which so crushed and injured them, that the crews, giving up all hope, took a solemn leave of each other. But in this desperate crisis they owed their lives to the presence of mind and agility of De Veer, who with a well-secured rope leaped from one fragment of ice to another till he gained a firm field, on which first the sick, then the stores, the crews, and finally the boats themselves, were safely landed. Here they were obliged to remain while the boats underwent the necessary repairs, and during this detention upon a floating ice-field the gallant Barentz closed the eventful voyage of his life. He died as he had lived, calmly and bravely, thinking less of himself than of the safety of his crew, for his last words were directions as to the course in which they were to steer. Even the joyful prospect of a return to their families and home could not console his surviving comrades for the loss of their leader, whom they loved and revered as a friend and father. After a most tedious and dangerous passage, they at length arrived at Kola in Russian Lapland, where to their glad surprise they found their old comrade, John Cornelis, who received them on board his vessel and conveyed them to Amsterdam.

During the seventeenth century the most remarkable maritime discoveries were made by the English, Dutch, and Spaniards, though by the latter only at its commencement. In the year 1605 Quiros sailed from Callao, discovered the island of Sagittaria, since so renowned under the name of Otaheite, and the archipelago of Espiritu Santo, or the New Hebrides of Cook. On this journey he was accompanied by Torres, the bold seaman who some years after gave his name to the strait which separates New Guinea from Australia.

While the declining sun of Spain was thus gilding with its last rays the northern shore of New Holland, the meridian splendour of the Batavian republic cast forth bright beams of light over the wide Pacific.

Schouten and Le Maire, penetrating through the strait which is still named after the latter, sailed in the year 1616 round Tierra del Fuego; and about the same time Hartog discovered Eendragt's Land, on the west coast of Australia. The successive voyages of Jan Edel (1619), Peter Nuyts (1627), and Peter Carpenter (1628), brought to light the northern and southern shores of the vast island, which thus began to assume a rude shape on the map of the geographer. In the year 1642, Abel Tasman, the greatest of the Dutch navigators, drew a mighty furrow through the South Sea, discovered Van Diemen's Land, which posterity desirous of perpetuating his fame has called Tasmania, saw the northern extremity of New Zealand emerge from the ocean, and finally unveiled to the world the hidden beauties of Tonga.

While the Dutch navigators were thus dissipating the darkness of Australia, Hudson and Baffin were immortalising their names in the Arctic Ocean.

In the year 1627 Henry Hudson made the first attempt to steer right on to the pole, and to cross to India over the axis of the globe. He reached the northern extremity of Spitzbergen, but all his attempts to penetrate deeper into the polar ocean were baffled by the mighty ice-fields that opposed his progress. But though he failed in his undertaking to sail through the region of eternal winter to the spicy groves of India, yet the numerous morses and seals he had seen basking on the coast of Spitzbergen opened such cheering prospects of future profit, that the "Muscovy Company," which had fitted out the expedition, was by no means discontented with the issue of his voyage.

Three years after we find the gallant Hudson once more attempting to discover the north-west passage in a vessel of fifty-five tons, provisioned for six months. The crew which he commanded was unfortunately utterly unworthy of such a leader, and quailed as soon as they had to encounter the fog and ice-fields of the Frozen Ocean.

"And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold; And ice mast-high came floating by, As green as emerald.

And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen, Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken, The ice was all between."

But, in spite of the murmurs and repinings of his faint-hearted followers, the dauntless commander pressed on through the strait which bears his name, until at last his little bark emerged into a boundless deep blue sea. Hudson's Bay lay before him, but the delighted discoverer was happy in the belief that the grand object of his voyage was attained, and the shortest road to India laid open to the mariners of England. It was about the beginning of August, and the spiritless crew considering the passage accomplished, urged an immediate return; but Hudson was determined on completing the adventure, and wintering if possible on the sunny shores of India.

Three months long he continued tracking the coasts of that vast northern Mediterranean, now for the first time explored by civilised man, vainly hoping to see a new channel opening to the west, until at length November came and imprisoned his small vessel in adamantine fetters. A long and dreary winter awaited the ice-bound seamen, with almost exhausted provisions, and unfortunately without that heroic patience and serene concord which had sustained the sufferings of Barentz and his companions. It must indeed have been a melancholy winter for poor Hudson, solitary and friendless among scowling ruffians, hating him as the cause of their bitter misery; but spring came at last with its consolatory sunshine, and hope once more dawned in his tortured breast. The ship is again afloat, and on the 21st of June, 1611, the captain comes forth from his cabin, refreshed by the sleep of a quiet conscience, and strong in body and mind to meet the duties of the day. But as he steps on deck his arms are suddenly pinioned, and he finds himself in the power of a mutinous crew. He looks around for some trace of sympathy, but hatred meets him in every eye. Inquiry, remonstrance, entreaty, command, all alike fail to move their stubborn resolution, and now Hudson resigns himself bravely to his fate, with all the quiet dignity of a noble nature, and looks calmly at the ominous preparations going forward. A small open boat is in waiting, and into this he is lowered, some powder and shot and the carpenter's box come next, followed by the carpenter himself, a strong brave fellow, the captain's _one_ devoted adherent among the rebellious crew; the sick and infirm complete the unfortunate cargo. A signal is given, the boat is cast adrift, and soon the last faint cry for mercy expires in the breeze which carries the vessel onwards on its homeward course.

Thus perished the high-minded Hudson, without further tiding or trace, on the scene of his glory; but the vengeance of heaven soon overtook the ringleaders of that dark conspiracy. Some fell in a fight with the Eskimos, and others died on the homeward voyage, which was performed under the extremity of famine. Whatever horrors may have attended the last moments of Hudson, his sufferings were less, for his conscience was undefiled by guilt.

In the year 1616 Baffin sailed round the enormous bay to which his name has been given, but without attempting to penetrate through any one of those wide sounds that have led the Arctic navigators of our days to so many glorious discoveries.

From the times of Tasman, whose bold voyage through the wastes of the Southern Pacific has already been mentioned, to those of our own immortal Cook, but very little was done for the progress of geography, as if, after so many heroic endeavours, the spirit of maritime discovery had required a long repose to recruit its energies, ere the greatest navigator of modern times was destined to unveil the mysterious darkness which still concealed one half of the vast Pacific from the knowledge of mankind. The voyages most worthy of remark during this period were those of the Cossack Semen Deshnew (1654), who sailed from the mouth of the Kolyma River round the eastern promontory of Asia, and must be considered as the discoverer of Behring's Straits; of the adventurous Dampier (1689-1691), that strange combination of the buccaneer, the author, and the naturalist, who first discovered the strait which separates New Guinea from New Ireland; of the Dutchman Roggewein (1721-23), who made known some islands in the Pacific; of the brothers Laptew and of Prontschitschew (1734-1743), who unveiled the greatest part of the Siberian coast; of Commodore Anson (1740-1744), whose heroic sufferings and successes in the Pacific still live in the memory of his countrymen; and of the unfortunate Behring (1730-1741), who terminated his second unsuccessful exploring expedition by a miserable death on a desert island.

After the peace of Aix la Chapelle England felt that the dominion of the seas imposed upon her the obligation of extending the bounds of geographical knowledge, and thus in rapid succession Byron (1764) and Wallis and Carteret (1766-1768) were sent forth to discover unknown shores, while France made a simultaneous effort to refresh the somewhat meagre laurels she had reaped by the voyages of Verazzani and Cartier. The consequences of this emulation were not unimportant. Bougainville (1766-1768) completed the discovery of the Solomon Islands, which Mendana had only partly seen; Wallis made the world acquainted with the beauties of Tahiti, and Byron explored the unvisited coasts of Patagonia. But the fame of these worthy mariners was soon eclipsed by a greater renown, for, in the same year that Wallis returned from his expedition, Cook sailed from the port of Plymouth on his first voyage round the world.

CHAP. XXVI.

What had Cook's Predecessors left him to discover?--His first Voyage.--Discovery of the Society Islands, and of the East Coast of New Holland.--His second Voyage.--Discovery of the Hervey Group.--Researches in the South Sea.--The New Hebrides.--Discovery of New Caledonia and of South Georgia.--His third Voyage.--The Sandwich Islands.--New Albion.--West Georgia.--Cook's Murder.--Vancouver.--La Peyrouse.

To form a correct estimate of Cook's discoveries, it is necessary that, before following the track of that great seaman, we should glance over the vast regions of the Pacific previously unknown to man. Many navigators indeed, since Magellan, had traversed that immense ocean, but the greater part of its expanse still lay buried in obscurity.

To the north of the line, the Spaniards, sailing from Manilla to Acapulco, still servilely followed the route which Urdaneta had pointed out, and all beyond was unexplored.

The regions to the south of the line were better known, but here also maritime discoverers, with the sole exception of Tasman, had confined themselves to the tropical waters. No one had yet tried to sail through the boundless space which to the south of the 25th degree of latitude extended between New Zealand and America. Of Australia only the western coast was known; the existence of Torres' Strait had long since been forgotten, and New Guinea and New Holland were supposed to form one connected land. To the south no one knew whether Australia and Van Diemen's Land were joined together, or severed by a channel; and the eastern coast of the fifth part of the world still awaited a discoverer. The boundaries of New Zealand were buried in the same obscurity. Tasman had only visited the west coast of the northern island, which, as far as was then known, might have extended a thousand miles farther on towards Chili. In one word, the great geographical problem of an enormous southern continent, the existence of which was formerly supposed necessary to form the counterpoise of the northern lands, still remained unsolved. The discoveries already made had indeed narrowed the limits which during the sixteenth century were still assigned to that imaginary continent, but in the unexplored bosom of the South Sea there yet was room enough for lands surpassing the whole of Europe in extent. Many of the South Sea islands moreover, though discovered before Cook's voyages, had vanished again from the memory of the world, or, according to Humboldt's expression, "wavered, as if badly rooted on the map, for want of exact astronomical measurements." Thus two hundred and fifty years after Magellan the Pacific still offered an enormous field for discovery, and when Cook set sail on the 30th of July, 1768, on his first voyage of circumnavigation, nearly one half of the globe lay open to his researches.

The first service he rendered on this voyage was the discovery that the route to the Pacific through the Strait of Le Maire and round Cape Horn was preferable to that which until then had been followed, through the Straits of Magellan.

After having observed at Otaheite the transit of Venus across the sun, which was one of the chief objects of the expedition, he soon after landed on the shores of Huaheine, Ulietea, and Borabora, which had never yet been visited by a European mariner, and gave to the whole group the name of the Society Islands, on account of their close vicinity to each other. Thence he sailed to New Zealand, which he was the first to find consisted of two large islands, separated by the strait which bears his name. With unwearied industry he spent no less than six months on the accurate survey of the New Zealand group, and then sailed to New Holland, the eastern coast of which he first discovered, and closely examined in its full length of 2000 miles. He also found that the continent of Australia was separated from New Guinea by a channel which he called "Endeavour Strait," but to which the justice of posterity has restored or awarded the name of Torres, its first explorer. This whole sea is so full of dangerous reefs and shoals that for months the sounding line was scarce ever laid aside, and any less experienced and prudent navigator must inevitably have been wrecked during these constant cruises in such perilous waters. Even Cook owed more than once his preservation to what may well be called a miraculous interposition of Providence, of which I shall cite a remarkable example. It was on the 10th of June, 1770, in the latitude of Trinity Bay. The vessel sailed, under a fresh breeze and by clear moonlight, through a sea the depth of which the plummet constantly indicated at 20 to 21 fathoms, so that not the least danger was apprehended. But suddenly the depth diminished to four fathoms, and before the lead could be heaved again the vessel struck and remained immoveable, except as far as she was heaved up and down and dashed against the rocks by the surge. The general anxiety may be imagined, and indeed the situation was such as to warrant the most serious apprehensions. It was found that the ship had been lifted over the ledge of a rock and lay in a hollow, inside of the reef, where the water in some places was three or four fathoms deep and in others hardly as many feet. The sheathing boards were knocked off and floating round the ship in great numbers, and at last the false keel also was destroyed, while the constant grating of the vessel against the rock seemed to announce its speedy disruption. It was now necessary to lighten the vessel as much as possible, and soon more than 50 tons' weight was thrown overboard.

On the following morning land was seen at the distance of eight miles; but no islet lay between, on which, in case the vessel went to pieces, a speedy refuge might be found. To add to their distress, the vessel drew so much water that three pumps could hardly master it; and, finally, it was found that even the rising of the flood, on which they mainly reckoned, was unavailing to extricate them from their perilous position. All that could possibly be spared was now therefore cast into the sea, still more to lighten the vessel, and thus the next tide was patiently expected, when, after incredible exertion, the ship righted, and they got her over the ledge of the rock into deep water.

But the men were by this time so much exhausted by their uninterrupted labour that they could not stand to the pumps more than five or six minutes at a time, after which they threw themselves flat on the streaming deck, where they lay till others exhausted like themselves took their places, on which they started up again and renewed their exertions. In this desperate situation one of the midshipmen, named Monkhouse, bethought himself of a means by which a ship, having sprung a leak admitting more than four feet of water in an hour, had yet been able to perform the whole journey from Virginia to London. He took a lower studding-sail, and, having mixed a large quantity of oakum and wool together, stitched them down by handfuls as lightly as possible. The sail was then hauled under the ship's bottom by means of ropes which kept it extended. When it came under the leak, the wool and oakum, with part of the sail, were forced inwards by the pressure of the water, which thus prevented its own ingress in such an effectual manner that one pump, instead of three, was now sufficient to keep it under. In this way they got the ship into a convenient port on the coast of New Holland, where they repaired the injury. Here it was found that their preservation was not entirely owing to that ingenious expedient, for one of the holes in the ship's bottom was almost entirely plugged by a piece of rock which had broken off and stuck in it; and this hole was so large, that, had it not been filled up in this truly extraordinary manner, the vessel must undoubtedly have sunk. Some persons, leading a tranquil life unvexed by storm or wave, might perhaps be inclined to ascribe so miraculous an escape to chance, but the seaman, who has had death before his eyes, will always in such a case recognise the hand of an Almighty protector: and who can doubt that a thrill of intense gratitude flashed through the soul of Cook on the discovery of the cause to which he owed the preservation of his life?

With a vessel thus shattered, and a crew thus worn with fatigue, further discoveries were no more to be thought of, and Cook hastened to return by way of Batavia and the Cape to England, where he arrived on the 11th of June, 1771.

The object of his second voyage (1772-1775) was to determine finally the question of the existence of a great southern continent, and to extend the geography of that part of the globe to its utmost limits. Sir Joseph Banks and Dr. Solander had accompanied him on his first voyage, this time John Reinhold Forster and his son George were engaged by government to explore and collect the natural history of the countries through which they should pass.

On the 13th of July, 1772, Cook sailed from Plymouth, and reached the Cape without having a single man sick. Well aware how much cleanliness and pure air contribute to health, he had neglected none of the means necessary to insure it. Every day the beds were aired, the linen of the sailors was frequently washed, and in rainy weather fire often made between decks, to dispel unwholesome damps and effluvia.

He now sailed to the south far into a desert and unknown sea, crossed it in various directions, and after having spent 117 days on the ocean, mostly among floating ice-fields, and without having once seen land, he steered northwards to the well-known coast of New Zealand, where on the 25th of January, 1773, he cast anchor in Dusky Bay. The feelings of the seaman may be imagined, when, after long wanderings over the waste of waters, he sees land, mountains, forests, and green plains rise above the horizon, when singing-birds take the place of the wild sea-mew, and friendly faces greet him on the strand. A beneficent mind is ever anxious to do good, and thus before sailing farther on to Otaheite, Cook caused a little garden to be planted, in which European vegetable seeds were sown and confided with proper instructions to the care of the intelligent savages, who were moreover presented with goats and pigs.

On the return voyage from Tahiti to New Zealand, where he intended to provide himself with fire-wood and provisions, before advancing once more into the high southern latitudes, he was pleased with the discovery of the small but lovely Harvey Islands, whose green girdle of cocoa-nut palms mirrors itself in the dark blue waters.

And now again he cruised in all directions through the icy sea, over an extent of 65° of longitude and as far as the 71st degree of southern latitude, without having seen any land; and having thus satisfied himself of the non-existence of a southern continent, or at least of its circumscription within bounds which must ever render it perfectly useless to man, he left those dreary regions of eternal winter, to continue his discoveries under a less inclement sky.

He first visited Easter Island and the Marquesas, where a new discovery received the name of Hood's Island, and on the way thence to Tahiti added the Palisser Group to the map of the world. We now follow him to the extensive archipelago of Espiritu Santo, first seen by Quiros in 1606, who took it for a part of the imaginary southern continent. Since then it had only been visited by Bougainville (1768), who however had contented himself with landing on the Isle of Lepers, and ascertaining the fact that it did not form part of a continent but of a considerable group of islands. Cook on his part examined the whole archipelago in such an accurate manner, ascertaining the situation of many of the islands and discovering such numbers of new ones, that he justly thought he had acquired the right to rebaptize them under the name of the New Hebrides.

From these islands he sailed for the third time to New Zealand, and discovered on his passage New Caledonia and the romantic Norfolk Island.

Leaving New Zealand on the 10th of November, 1774, once more to search for the southern continent, he traversed a vast extent of sea for 17 days, from 43° to 55° 48′ S. lat., when he gave up all thoughts of finding any more land in that part of the ocean, and determined to steer directly for the west entrance of the Straits of Magellan, with a design of coasting the southern part of Tierra del Fuego, quite round Cape Horn to Le Maire's Straits. Those wild, deeply indented, rocky coasts, the region of eternal storms and fogs, form the most striking contrast to the smiling shores of the South Sea islands. But, if in the latter the splendour of tropical vegetation enchants the eye of the spectator, the exuberance of animal life in the Magellanic Archipelago may well raise his astonishment. In one of the small islands near Staaten Land Cook admired the remarkable harmony reigning among the different species of mammifera and birds. The sea-lions occupied the greatest part of the sea-coast, the bears the inland; the shags were posted on the highest cliffs, the penguins in such places as had the best access to the sea; and the other birds chose more retired places. Occasionally, however, all these animals were seen to mix together like domestic cattle and poultry in a farmyard, without one attempting to hurt the other in the least. Even the eagles and the vultures were frequently observed sitting together on the hills among the shags, while none of the latter, either old or young, appeared to be disturbed at their presence. No doubt the poor fishes had to pay for the touching union of this "happy family."

Having fully explored the southern extremity of America, we once more see the indefatigable navigator steer forth into the deserts of the southern Polar Ocean, where he discovers some snow-clad isles, Bird Island, South Georgia, Sandwich Land, the southern Thule; and finally returns to England (30th July, 1775) after an absence of three years and seventeen days.

His third voyage (1776) was undertaken for the purpose of exploring the Northern Pacific, and casting the same broad light over those unvisited waters as over the southern part of that vast ocean. To the south-east of the Cape of Good Hope he discovered Prince Edward's Islands, and thence proceeded to explore Kerguelen's Land, discovered six years previously by the Frenchman of that name. This wintry island bears neither tree nor shrub, but in the bays the gigantic sea-weeds form submarine forests, and countless penguins make the dreary shores resound with their deep braying voice.

Van Diemen's Land, New Zealand, and the Friendly and Society Isles were now visited for the last time. Steering to the north, Cook discovered in the last days of the year 1777 the Sandwich Islands, most likely previously known to the Spaniards, but kept secret from the world; and reached on the 7th of March, 1778, the mountainous forest-girt coast of New Albion, along which two centuries before Drake had sailed as far as 48° N. lat. Penetrating farther and farther to the north, he at length reached the most westerly point of the American continent, Cape Prince of Wales, which, stretching far out into the Straits of Behring, is only thirty-nine miles distant from the east coast of Siberia. Both pillars of this water-gate, according to Chamisso's description, are high mountains within sight of each other, rising abruptly from the sea on the Asiatic side, while on the American their foot is bordered by a low alluvial plain. On the Asiatic side the sea has its greatest depth, and the current, which sets from the south into the channel with a rapidity of two or three knots an hour, its greatest strength. Whales and numberless herds of walruses are seen only on the Asiatic side.

Through these famous straits, which Deshnew had first passed, and which Behring most likely never saw, Cook penetrated into the Arctic Ocean, examined a part of the Siberian coast, and then sailed to the opposite shores of America, where he discovered and explored the coast of West Georgia as far as 70° 44′ N. lat., until fields of ice opposed an impenetrable barrier to his progress.

After having thus illumined with the torch of science the farthest extremities of the earth, Cook once more steered to the south and discovered Hawaii, the largest of the Sandwich Islands. But better had it been for him if the glory of this discovery had fallen to the share of some other navigator, for it was here that the illustrious seaman, who had thrice circumnavigated the globe, was doomed to fall by the club of a barbarous savage.

No navigator has ever made so many important discoveries at such distances from each other as Cook, or done more for the progress of geographical knowledge. The wide Pacific he so thoroughly explored, that his successors found only single ears to glean where he had reaped the richest harvest. With the firm resolution and the indomitable perseverance of the ancient mariners who preceded him on that vast ocean, he combined a scientific knowledge they never possessed. What they had only flightily observed, or imperfectly described, he in reality discovered, and indelibly marked upon the map of the globe. Indefatigable with the astrolabe and the plummet, he neglected no opportunity of pointing out to his successors both the dangers they would have to avoid, and the harbours in which they might find a refuge against storms, and a supply of fresh water and provisions. His excellent method of preserving the health of seamen from the murderous attacks of the scurvy, secures him a lasting place among the benefactors of mankind. But he not only anxiously watched over the welfare of his companions--his humanity extended a no less salutary influence over the savages with whom he came in contact. He everywhere sought to better their condition, made them presents of useful animals and seeds, and pointed out to them the advantages of peace and agriculture. But his chief praise remains yet to be told, and this is, that he owed the high position he acquired in life exclusively to himself. He whose fame reached as far as the limits of the civilised world, and whose death was mourned as a national calamity, was the son of a poor labourer, and had commenced his career as a common sailor.

The most celebrated navigators during the last quarter of the eighteenth century were Vancouver and La Peyrouse.

Vancouver, who had accompanied Cook on his last and fatal voyage, gained his chief laurels (1790) by thoroughly exploring the north-west coast of America, which his illustrious friend had merely sketched in its most important outlines, having been prevented by his untimely end from investigating it more fully on a second visit. Vancouver began his hydrographical labours at Cape Mendocino, examined the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and, having convinced himself of the non-existence of a passage to the eastward, accurately investigated the labyrinth of bays, isles, sounds, and inlets, extending between 50° and 60° N. lat., thus establishing the important fact of the uninterrupted continuation of the American continent in these parts. Vancouver's Island will transmit his name to the latest posterity, and British Columbia remember him as the first navigator that accurately mapped her shores.

The fame of La Peyrouse is owing more to his misfortunes than to his eminent services. After having distinguished himself as a naval officer, he was sent by the equally unfortunate Louis XVI. on the voyage of discovery from which he was never to return. On the coast of Tartary and in the Japanese seas he examined a part of the world which hitherto no European had visited, and after having rectified many geographical errors sailed to Botany Bay, whence he forwarded his last despatches (7th Feb. 1788) to Europe. With the design of sailing through Torres' Straits to the Gulf of Carpentaria, he left the new-born English colony, but disappeared in the trackless ocean, and years and years passed on without solving the mystery of his fate.

At length, in 1826, Captain Dillon, an Englishman, was informed by Martin Bushart, a Prussian sailor whom he found settled on the Island of Tikopia, that many years since two large ships had been wrecked on the neighbouring Island of Vanikoro. Having brought this intelligence to Calcutta, he was sent out by the East India Company in the "Research" to make further inquiries on the scene of the catastrophe. On the 13th of Sept., 1827, Dillon anchored at Vanikoro, and, having collected the most interesting relics of the shipwreck, left it after a few weeks.

These facts became known at Hobart Town to the French circumnavigator Dumont d'Urville, who immediately resolved to sail to Vanikoro. He arrived there on the 22nd Feb., 1828, but at first found it very difficult to persuade the suspicious natives to point out to him the remains of the wrecked ship, until the offer of a piece of red cloth effectually overcame their scruples. One of the boldest immediately jumped into a boat and offered to guide them on condition of receiving the proffered reward. The bargain was gladly struck, and the Frenchmen, piloted by the negro, eagerly pushed off from shore.

The coral reef which forms an enormous girdle round Vanikoro approaches the land opposite to the village of Paiou, so that the distance between them is hardly a mile. There, in a channel dividing the breakers, the savage caused the boat to stop, and made signs to the Frenchmen to look down to the bottom, where they saw anchors, cannons, and other objects scattered about and overgrown with corals. No doubt now remained, and with deep emotion they gazed on these last memorials of the unfortunate expedition of La Peyrouse. Metal alone had been able to resist the tooth of time, the rolling waters, or the gnawing ship-worm; all wood-work was gone.

I have already stated that on d'Urville's arrival he found the natives extremely distrustful and shy, answering all his questions by negations. It was evident that their conduct towards La Peyrouse had been anything but hospitable, and that they now feared the tardy vengeance of the white men. But, finding themselves treated with invariable kindness, their fears gradually gave way, and thus it became possible to gather some information about the catastrophe from some old men who had witnessed it, and from the most intelligent of the chiefs.

After a dark and stormy night the islanders saw early on the following morning an enormous _pirogue_ stranded on the coral reef on the south side of the island. The surf soon destroyed the ship, and but a small number of the crew reached the shore in a boat. On the following day a second large _pirogue_ stranded opposite Paiou. But this wreck lying on the lee-side of the island, less exposed to the surf, and resting on a more even ground, remained a longer time without going to pieces. The whole of the crew escaped in the boats to Paiou, where they built a small vessel, and after a stay of five months once more embarked, and were never heard of since. Most likely they had steered towards New Ireland, with the intention of ultimately reaching the Moluccas or the Philippine Islands, and perished on some unknown reef. The unhealthy condition of d'Urville's crew prevented him from extending his researches any further along the western coasts of the Solomon Islands. That the stranded vessels were those of La Peyrouse is beyond all doubt; for years before and after no other large vessels had been lost in those seas. The heavy cannons could only have belonged to ships of war such as La Peyrouse commanded, and several of the instruments collected by Captain Dillon evidently belonged to a scientific expedition.

Before d'Urville left Vanikoro he resolved to raise a simple monument to the memory of his unfortunate countrymen, a four-sided pyramid resting on a square base. Neither nails nor iron clasps fastened the coral blocks together, for fear of awakening the cupidity of the savages; and, if they have kept their word to honour the _Papalangi_ monument as they would a temple erected to their own gods, it still reminds the navigator whom chance may lead to that secluded island, of the renown and tragical end of the ill-fated La Peyrouse.

CHAP. XXVII.

Scoresby.--The Arctic Navigators.--Ross.--Parry.--Sufferings of Franklin and his Companions on his Overland Expedition in 1821.--Parry's Sledge-journey to the North Pole.--Sir John Franklin.--M'Clure.--Kane.--M'Clintock.--South Polar Expeditions.--Billinghausen.--Weddell.--Biscoe.--Balleny.--Dumont d'Urville.--Wilkes.--Sir James Ross.--Recent scientific Voyages of Circumnavigation.

Although the undaunted courage and indomitable perseverance of the great navigators whom I have named in the preceding chapters had gradually circumscribed the bounds of discovery, and no vast ocean remained to be explored by some future Cook or Magellan, yet at the beginning of this century many secrets of the sea still remained unrevealed to man.

The north coast of America and the Arctic Ocean beyond were still plunged in mysterious darkness; and although Cook in several places had advanced far into the Antarctic seas, yet here also a wide field still lay open to the adventurous seaman.

Many coasts, many groups of islands scattered over the vast bosom of the ocean, awaited a more accurate survey, and would no doubt have remained unexplored, if gold, as in former times, had still been the sole magnet which attracted the seafarer to distant parts of the world. But fortunately science had now become a power which induced man, without any prospect of immediate profit, to spare no expense and to shrink from no danger, that he might become better and better acquainted with his dwelling-place the earth.

It cannot be denied that our century has laboured at the solution of all these various geographical questions with an energy and perseverance unexampled in the history of civilisation; and the prominent part she has taken in their investigation is undoubtedly one of the great glories of England. At no other time have more voyages of discovery and more scientific expeditions been undertaken; never have more courageous Argonauts gone forth to conquer the golden fleece of knowledge. It will be the pleasing task of this closing chapter to follow these noble mariners in their adventurous course; and, to avoid confusion, I shall begin with a short history of Arctic discovery up to the present day, and afterwards treat of the efforts made to extend our knowledge towards the South Pole. In spite of the unsuccessful efforts of a Frobisher, a Davis, a Hudson, and a Baffin, England had never given up the hope of discovering a northern passage to India, either direct across the Pole, or round the north coast of America. It had been one of the chief objects of Cook's third voyage to find a sea-path from Behring's Straits to Baffin's or Hudson's Bay; and some years before, while the illustrious navigator was busy exploring the Southern Pacific, we see Captain Phipps renewing the old attempt to sail direct to the Pole (1773). But, like his predecessor Hudson, he reached no farther than the northern extremity of Spitzbergen, where his vessel, surrounded by mighty ice-blocks, would have perished but for a timely change of wind. This repulse damped for a time the spirit of discovery; but hope revived again when it became known that Scoresby, on a whaling expedition in the Greenland seas (1806), had attained 81° N. lat. and thus approached the Pole to within 540 miles. No one before him had ever reached so far to the north, and an open sea tempted him mightily to proceed, but as the object of his voyage was strictly commercial, and he himself answerable to the owners of his vessel, Scoresby felt obliged to sacrifice his inclinations to his duty and to steer again to the south.

During the continental war, England indeed had little leisure to prosecute discoveries in the Arctic Ocean; but not long after the conclusion of peace (1818) two expeditions were sent out for that purpose.

Captain Buchan, with the ships "Dorothea" and "Trent," sailed with instructions to proceed in a direction as due north as might be practicable through the Spitzbergen Sea; but, having after much difficulty gained lat. 80° 34′ north in that polar archipelago, he was obliged speedily to withdraw and try his fortune off the western edge of the pack. Here however a tremendous gale, threatening every moment to crush the ships between the large ice-blocks heaving and sinking in the roaring billows, induced the bold experiment of dashing right into the body of the ice; a practice which has been resorted to by whalers in extreme cases, as their only chance of escaping destruction.

"While we were yet a few fathoms from the ice," says Admiral Beechey, the eloquent eye-witness and narrator of the dreadful scene, "we searched with much anxiety for a place that was more open than the general line of the pack, but in vain; all parts appeared to be equally impenetrable, and to present one unbroken line of furious breakers, in which immense pieces of ice were heaving and subsiding with the waves.

"No language, I am convinced, can convey an adequate idea of the terrific grandeur of the effect now produced by the collision of the ice and the tempestuous ocean. The sea violently agitated, and rolling its mountainous waves against an opposing body, is at all times a sublime and awful sight; but when, in addition, it encounters immense masses, which it has set in motion with a violence equal to its own, its effect is prodigiously increased. At one moment it bursts upon these icy fragments, and buries them many feet beneath its wave, and the next, as the buoyancy of the depressed body struggles for reascendency, the water rushes in foaming cataracts over its edges; whilst every individual mass, rocking and labouring in its bed, grinds against and contends with its opponent until one is either split with the shock or upheaved upon the surface of the other. Nor is this collision confined to one particular spot, it is going on as far as the sight can reach; and when, from this convulsive scene below, the eye is turned to the extraordinary appearance of the blink in the sky above, where the unnatural clearness of a calm and silvery atmosphere presents itself bounded by a dark hard line of stormy clouds, such as at this moment lowered over our masts, as if to mark the confines within which the efforts of man would be of no avail, the reader may imagine the sensation of awe which must accompany that of grandeur in the mind of the beholder.

"At this instant, when we were about to put the strength of our little vessel in competition with that of the great icy continent, and when it seemed almost presumption to reckon on the possibility of her surviving the unequal conflict, it was gratifying in the extreme to observe in all our crew the greatest calmness and resolution. If ever the fortitude of seamen was fairly tried, it was on this occasion; and I will not conceal the pride I felt in witnessing the bold and decisive tone in which the orders were issued by the commander of our little vessel (the since so far-famed and lamented Franklin), and the promptitude and steadiness with which they were executed by the crew.

"We were now so near the scene of danger as to render necessary the immediate execution of our plan, and in an instant the labouring vessel flew before the gale. Each person instinctively secured his own hold and with his eyes fixed upon the masts, awaited in breathless anxiety the moment of concussion. It soon arrived; the brig, cutting her way through the light ice, came in violent contact with the main body. In an instant we all lost our footing, the masts bent with the impetus, and the cracking timbers from below bespoke a pressure which was calculated to awaken our serious apprehensions. The vessel staggered under the shock, and for a moment seemed to recoil; but the next wave, curling up under her counter, drove her about her own length within the margin of the ice, where she gave one roll and was immediately thrown broadside to the wind by the succeeding wave. This unfortunate occurrence prevented the vessel from penetrating sufficiently far into the ice to escape the effect of the gale, and placed her in a situation where she was assailed on all sides by battering rams, if I may use the expression, every one of which contested the small space, which she occupied, and dealt such unrelenting blows that there appeared to be scarcely any possibility of saving her from foundering. Literally tossed from piece to piece, we had nothing left but patiently to abide the issue, for we could scarcely keep our feet, much less render any assistance to the vessel. The motion indeed was so great, that the ship's bell, which in the heaviest gale of wind had never struck of itself, now tolled so continually that it was ordered to be muffled, for the purpose of escaping the unpleasant association it was calculated to produce."

By setting more head-sail, though at the risk of the masts, already tottering with the pressure of that which was spread, the vessels, splitting the ice and thus effecting a passage between the pieces, were at length released from their perilous situation, but the "Dorothea" was found to be completely disabled. A short time at Fairhaven in Spitsbergen was spent in necessary repairs, and even then she was unfit for any farther service than the voyage to England. Franklin volunteered to prosecute the enterprise with the "Trent" alone, but the Admiralty Orders opposed such a proceeding, and the vessels returned home in company.

Meanwhile Captain John Ross, with the "Isabella" and "Alexander," had proceeded to Baffin's Bay, but instead of exploring Smith's, Jones's, and Lancaster Sounds, which recent voyages have proved to be each and all grand open channels to the Polar Sea, he contented himself with Baffin's assertion that they were enclosed by land, and, after having thus fruitlessly accomplished the circuit of the bay, returned to England.

With Parry's first expedition, which took place in the following year (1819), the epoch of modern discoveries in the Arctic Ocean, may properly be said to begin. Sailing right through Lancaster Sound, he discovered Prince Regent Inlet, Wellington Channel, and Melville Island. Willingly would he have proceeded farther to the west, but the ice was now rapidly gathering, the vessels were soon beset, and, after getting free with great difficulty, Parry was only too glad to turn back, and settle down in Winter Harbour. It was no easy task to attain this dreary port, as a canal two miles and a third in length had first to be cut through solid ice of seven inches average thickness, yet such was the energy of that splendid expedition, that the Herculean labour was accomplished in three days. The two vessels were immediately put in winter trim, the decks housed over, heating apparatus arranged, and everything done to make the ten months' imprisonment in those Arctic solitudes as comfortable as possible.

It was not before the 1st of August that the ships were able to leave Winter Harbour, when Parry once more stood boldly for the west, but no amount of skill or patience could penetrate the obstinate masses of ice, or insure the safety of the vessels under the repeated shocks they sustained. Finding the barriers absolutely invincible he gave way, and, steering homeward, reached London on Nov. 3, 1820, where, as may well be imagined, his reception was most enthusiastic and cordial.

While this wonderful voyage was performing, Franklin, Richardson, and Back, with two English sailors and a troop of Canadians and Indians, were penetrating by land to the mouth of the Coppermine River, whence they intended to make a boat-voyage of discovery along the coasts of the Icy Ocean. An idea of the difficulties of this undertaking may be formed, when I mention that the travellers started from Fort York, in Hudson's Bay, on the 30th of August, 1819, and after a voyage of 700 miles up the Saskatchewan, reached Fort Cumberland, where they spent the first winter. The next found them 700 miles further on their journey, established during the extreme cold at Fort Enterprise. During the summer of 1821 they accomplished the remaining 334 miles, and on the 21st of July commenced their exploration of the Polar Sea in two birch-bark canoes. In these frail shallops they skirted the desolate coast of the American continent, 555 miles to the east of the Coppermine, as far as Point Turnagain, when the rapid decrease of their provisions and the shattered state of the canoes imperatively compelled their return. And now began a dreadful land-journey of two months, accompanied by all the horrors of famine. A lichen, called by the Canadians _tripe de roche_ (rock-tripe), afforded them for some time a wretched subsistence, and, that failing, they were glad to satisfy their hunger with scraps of roasted leather or burnt bones, from prey which the wolves might have abandoned. On reaching the Coppermine a raft had to be framed, a task accomplished with the utmost difficulty by the exhausted party. One or two of the Canadians had already fallen behind, and never rejoined their comrades, and now three or four sank down, and could proceed no farther. Back, with the most vigorous of the men, had already pushed on to send help from Fort Enterprise; and Richardson, Hood, and Hepburn volunteered to remain with the disabled men, near a supply of the rock-tripe, while Franklin pursued his journey with the others capable of bearing him company. On reaching Fort Enterprise this last party found that wretched tenement completely deserted, and a note from Back stating that he had gone in pursuit of the Indians. Some cast-off deer-skins and a heap of bones, provisions worthy of the place, sustained their flickering life-flame, and after eighteen miserable days, they were joined in their dreary quarters by Richardson and Hepburn, the sole survivors of _their_ party. At length, when on the point of sinking under their sufferings, three Indians sent by Back brought them timely succour. After a while they were able to join this valuable friend, and the following year brought them safely back to England.

I pass over Parry's second and third voyages, undertaken in the years 1821 and 1824, which were consumed in fruitless endeavours to penetrate westward; the first through some unknown channel to the north of Hudson's Bay, the second through Prince Regent's Inlet; but his last attempt to reach the North Pole, by boat and sledge-travelling over the ice, is of too novel and daring a character to remain unnoticed. His hopes of success were founded on Scoresby's descriptions, who had seen ice-fields so free from either fissure or hummock, that, had they not been covered with snow, a coach might have been driven many leagues over them in a direct line, without obstruction or danger; but when Parry reached the ice-fields to the north of Spitzbergen he found them of a very different nature, composed of loose rugged masses, which rendered travelling over them extremely irksome and slow.

The strong flat-bottomed boats--amphibious constructions, half sledge, half canoe,--expressly built for an amphibious journey over a region where solid ice was expected to alternate with pools of water, had thus frequently to be unloaded, in order to be raised over the intervening blocks or mounds, and repeated journeys backward and forward over the same ground were the necessary consequences. In some places the ice took the form of sharp pointed crystals, which cut the boots like penknives; in others, sixteen or eighteen inches of soft snow made the work of boat-dragging both fatiguing and tedious. Sometimes the men were obliged, in dragging the boats, to crawl on all-fours, to make any progress at all, and one day, when heavy rain melted the surface of the ice, four hours of vigorous effort accomplished only half a mile.

Yet in spite of all these obstacles they toiled cheerfully on and on, until at length the discovery was made, that while they were apparently advancing towards the Pole, the ice-field on which they journeyed was moving to the south, and thus rendering all their exertions fruitless. Yet though disappointed in his great hope of planting his country's standard on that unattainable goal, Parry had the glory of reaching the highest latitude (82° 45′) ever attained by man.

Before this adventurous voyage, Franklin, Richardson, and Back, forgetful of their long life and death struggle with famine (1819), had once more (1825) with heroic perseverance bent their steps to the north. This time they chose the mouths of the Mackenzie for the starting-point of their discoveries, and having separated into two parties, proceeded to the east and west, and explored 4000 miles of unknown coast.

In 1829 Captain John Ross, having for a long time vainly solicited government to send him out once more on an Arctic expedition, was enabled by the munificence of a private individual, Mr. Felix Booth, to accomplish his wishes, and to purchase a small steamer, to which the rather presumptuous name of "Victory" was given. The selection of the vessel was no doubt unlucky enough: for can anything be conceived more unpractical than paddle-boxes among ice-blocks; but, to make amends for this error, the veteran commander was fortunate in being accompanied by his illustrious nephew, James Ross, who with every quality of the seaman united the ardour and knowledge of the most zealous naturalist.

He it was who discovered the peninsula which in compliment to the patron of the expedition was named Boothia Felix; to him also we owe the discovery of the Magnetic Pole; but the voyage is far less remarkable for these after all not very important successes, than for its unexampled protraction during a space of five years.

The first season had a fortunate termination. On the 10th of August, 1829, the "Victory" attained Prince Regent's Inlet, and reached on the 13th the spot where Parry on his third voyage had been obliged to abandon the "Fury." Of the ship itself no traces remained; but the provisions which had providently been stored up on land were found untouched. The solid tin boxes had effectually preserved them from the voracity of the white bears; and the flour, bread, wine, rum, and sugar were found as good after four years, as on the day when the expedition started.

It was to this discovery, to this "manna in the wilderness," that Ross owed his subsequent preservation; for how else could he have passed four winters in the Arctic waste? Never was the hand of Providence more distinctly visible than here.

On the 15th of August Cape Garry was attained, the most southern point of the inlet which Parry had reached on his third voyage. Fogs and drift-ice considerably retarded the progress of the expedition; but Ross, though slowly, moved on, so that about the middle of September the map of the northern regions was enriched by some 500 miles of newly discovered coast. But now winter broke in with all its Arctic severity, and the "Victory" was obliged to seek refuge in Felix Harbour, where the useless steam-engine was thrown overboard as a nuisance, and the usual preparations made for spending the cold season as agreeably as possible.

The following spring, from the 17th of May to the 13th of June, was employed by James Ross on a sledge journey, which led to the discovery of King William's Sound and King William's Land; and during which that courageous mariner penetrated so far to the west, that he had only ten days' provisions, scantily measured out, for a return voyage of 200 miles through an empty wilderness.

After an imprisonment of full twelve months the "Victory" was set free on the 17th of September, 1830, and proceeded once more on her discoveries. But the period of her liberty was short indeed, short like that of revolted slaves between two despotisms; for, after advancing three miles in one continual battle against the currents and the drift-ice, she again froze fast on the 27th of the same month.

In the following spring we again see the indefatigable James Ross, ever active in the cause of science, extending the circle of his excursions and planting the British flag upon the site of the Northern Magnetic Pole, which, however, is not invariably fixed to one spot, as was then believed, but moves from place to place within the glacial zone.

On the 28th of August, 1831, the "Victory," after a second imprisonment of eleven months, was warped into open water, and, after having spent a whole month to advance _four_ English miles, was again enclosed by the ice on the 27th of September.

But seven miles in two long years! According to this measure, there was but little hope indeed of ever seeing Old England again: the only chance left was to abandon the vessel, and endeavour by means of the boats left among the "Fury's" stores to reach Baffin's Bay, and get a homeward passage in some whaler. Accordingly the colours were nailed to the mast-head of the "Victory," and then officers and crew took leave of the ill-fated little vessel, on the 23rd of April, 1832. Captain Ross was deeply moved on this occasion; for, after having served forty-two years in thirty-five different ships, this was the first he had ever been obliged to abandon as a wreck.

Provisions and boats had now to be transported over long tracts of rugged ice, and as their great weight rendered it impossible to carry all at once, the same ground had to be traversed several times. Terrific snow storms retarded the progress of the wanderers, and invincible obstacles forced them to make long circuits. Thus it happened that during the first month of their pilgrimage through the wilderness, although they had travelled 329 miles, they only gained thirty in a direct line.

On the 9th of June, James Ross, the leading spirit of the expedition, accompanied by two men and with a fortnight's provisions, left the main body to ascertain the state of the boats and supplies at Fury Beach. Returning, they met their comrades on the 25th of June, and gratified them with the intelligence, that, though they had found three of the boats washed away, enough still remained for their purpose, and that all the provisions were in good condition.

On the 1st of July the whole party arrived at Fury Beach, whence, after having repaired the weather-worn boats, they set out again on the 1st of August, and, after much buffeting among the ice in their frail shallops, reached the mouth of the inlet by the end of the month. But here they were doomed to disappointment; for, after several fruitless attempts to run along Barrow's Strait, the obstructions from the ice obliged them to haul the boats on shore and pitch their tents.

Barrow's Strait was found from repeated surveys to be one impenetrable mass of ice. After lingering here till the third week in September, it was unanimously agreed that their only resource was to fall back again on the stores at Fury Beach, and spend their fourth winter in that dreary solitude. Here they sheltered their canvass tent with a wall of snow, and setting up an extra stove made themselves tolerably comfortable until the increasing severity of the winter, and the rigour of the cold, added to the tempestuous weather, made them perfect prisoners, and sorely tried their patience. Scurvy now began to appear, and several of the men fell victims to the scourge. At the same time cares for the future darkened the gloom of their situation, for, if they were not liberated in the ensuing summer, their diminishing food gave them but little hope of surviving another year.

It may be imagined how anxiously the aspect of the sea was watched during the ensuing summer, and with what beating hearts they at length embarked on the 15th of August. The spot which the year before they had attained after the most strenuous exertions was soon passed, and slowly winding their way through the ice-blocks with which the inlet was encumbered, they now saw the wide expanse of Barrow's Strait open before them. With spirits invigorated by hope they push on, alternately rowing and sailing, and on the night of the 25th rest in a good harbour on the eastern shore of Navy Board Inlet. "A ship in sight!" is the joyful sound that awakens them early on the following morning; and never have men more hurriedly and energetically set out, never have oars been more indefatigably plied. But the elements are against them, calms and currents conspire against their hopes, and to their inexpressible disappointment the ship disappears in the distant haze.

But after a few hours of suspense the sight of another vessel lying to in a calm relieves their despair. This time their exertions are crowned with success; and, wonderful! the vessel which receives them on board is the same "Isabella" in which Ross made his first voyage to these seas.

They told him of his own death, and could hardly be persuaded that it was really he and his party who now stood before them. But when all doubts were cleared away, you should have heard their thrice-repeated thundering hurrahs!

The scene that now followed cannot better be told than in Ross's own words:--

"Every man was hungry, and was to be fed; all were ragged, and were to be clothed; there was not one to whom washing was not indispensable; nor one whom his beard did not deprive of all human semblance. All, everything, too was to be done at once. It was washing, dressing, shaving, eating, all intermingled; it was all the materials of each jumbled together; while in the midst of all there were interminable questions to be asked and answered on both sides; the adventures of the "Victory," our own escapes, the politics of England, and the news, which was now four years old.

"But all subsided into peace at last. The sick were accommodated, the seamen disposed of, and all was done for us which care and kindness could perform.

"Night at length brought quiet and serious thoughts; and I trust there was not a man among us who did not then express, where it was due, his gratitude for that interposition which had raised us all from a despair which none could now forget, and had brought us from the very borders of a most distant grave to life and friends and civilisation. Long accustomed, however, to a cold bed on the hard snow or the bare rock, few could sleep amid the comfort of our accommodations. I was myself compelled to leave the bed which had been kindly assigned me, and take my abode in a chair for the night, nor did it fare much better with the rest. It was for time to reconcile us to this sudden and violent change, to break through what had become habit, and to inure us once more to the usages of our former days."

I have no time to relate how Ross was received in England, and what honours were heaped upon him; honours conferred with all the better grace that the nation had not forgotten him during his long-protracted absence, and had no cause to blush for culpable neglect. For Britain has ever considered it her duty to help and assist the men who venture their lives in the cause of science and for the advancement of her glory; nor will she allow the officer who carries her standard into unknown lands, and there falls a victim to nature or to man, to perish without feeling his last moments gladdened by the conviction, that, however distant his grave, the eye of his country rests upon him.

Thus when Back, that noble Paladin of Arctic research, volunteered to lead a relief expedition in quest of Ross, £4000 were immediately raised by public subscription to defray the expenses of the undertaking. While deep in the American wilds Back was gratified with the intelligence that the object of his search had safely arrived in England, but, instead of returning home, the indefatigable explorer resolved to trace the unknown course of the Thlu-it-scho, or Great Fish River, down to the distant outlet where it pours its waters into the polar seas. It would take a volume to recount his adventures in this wonderful expedition, the numberless falls, cascades, and rapids that obstructed his progress; the storms and snow-drifts that vainly conspired to repel him; the horrors of that iron-ribbed desert, without a single tree on the whole line of his passage; and how heroically he persevered to the very last, and added Back's River, as the Thlu-it-scho has most deservedly been called, to the geographical conquests of which England may well be proud.

The present is not a detailed account of Arctic discovery, a complete historical narrative of how step by step those dreary regions, the refuse of the earth, have grown into distinctness on the map; so passing over Simpson's wonderful boat-voyage along the northern shores of America, which led to the discovery of 1600 miles of coast (1837-1839), and Rae's important researches on Melville Peninsula (1846, 1847), I proceed to the last expedition of Sir John Franklin. We all know how the veteran seaman left England in the sixtieth year of his age, once more to try the north-western passage; how since his last despatches, dated from the Whalefish Islands, Baffin's Bay, July 12th, 1845, months and months, and then years and years, elapsed without bringing any tidings of his fate; how Collinson and M'Clure, Penny and Inglefield, Kane and Bellot, and so many other worthies, went out to search for the "Erebus" and "Terror," and how in spite of all their efforts mystery still overhung the ill-fated expedition, until M'Clintock raised the veil and informed us how miserably most of the gallant seamen perished in those dreary wastes, but how their commander had been spared the pangs of protracted suffering, and gone to his eternal rest even before his country began to feel concerned about his loss.

The search for Franklin is a page in history of which a nation may well be proud, more noble than a hundred battles and grander than the conquest of an empire. These are no blood-stained laurels, but palms of glory gained by matchless energy and perseverance over the horrors of a nature inimical to man, a theme which some future Homer will delight to sing. Had Franklin been ever so successful, he could not possibly have achieved so much for Arctic discovery as his loss gave rise to; for to the disasters of his voyage we owe the knowledge of all the coasts of that intricate conglomeration of islands which faces the Pole, and of the channels, which opening far to the north, lead to its profoundest, and seemingly impenetrable depths. All these discoveries are of little commercial value, it is true, for no trading vessel will ever plough those desert seas; but it is no small advantage to a nation to have to register such pages in her annals, and to leave them as a legacy and an example to future generations.

The series of modern South Polar expeditions was opened in 1819 by Smith's casual discovery of New South Shetland. Soon afterwards a Russian expedition under Lazareff and Bellinghausen discovered (January, 1821), in 69° 3′ south lat., the islands Paul the First and Alexander, the most southern lands that had ever been visited by man.

The year after, Captain Weddell, a sealer, penetrated into the icy sea as far as 74° 15′ south lat. three degrees nearer to the pole than had been attained by the indomitable perseverance of Cook. Swarms of petrels animated the sea, and no ice impeded his progress, but as the season was far advanced, and Weddell apprehended the dangers of the return voyage, he steered again to the north. In 1831 Biscoe discovered Enderby Land, and soon afterwards Graham's Land, to which the gratitude of geographers has since given the discoverer's name.

Then follows Balleny who in 1839 revealed the existence of the group of islands called after him, and of Sabrina Land (69° south lat.).

About the same time three considerable expeditions appear in the southern seas, sent out by France, the United States, and England.

Dumont d'Urville discovered _Terre Louis Philippe_ (63° 30′ south lat.) in February, 1838, and _Terre Adélie_ (66° 67′ south lat.) on the 21st of January, 1840.

Almost on the same day, Wilkes, the commander of the United States exploring expedition reached a coast which he followed for a length of 1500 miles, and which has been called Wilkes' Land, to commemorate the discoverer's name. But of all the explorers of the southern frozen ocean, the palm unquestionably belongs to Sir James Ross, who penetrated farther towards the Pole than any other navigator before or after, and followed up to 79° south lat. a steep coast, whose enormous glaciers stretched far out into the sea. In 77° 5′ south lat. he witnessed a magnificent eruption of Mount Erebus, the Etna of the extreme south. The enormous columns of flame and smoke rising two thousand feet above the mouth of the crater, which is elevated 12,000 feet above the level of the sea, combined, with the snow-white mountain-chain and the deep blue ocean, to form a scene, the magnificence of which seemed to be enhanced by the reflection that no human eye had ever witnessed its beauty, as most likely none will ever witness it again. As all the efforts of the gallant leader to penetrate still farther to the south were baffled by a mighty ice-barrier, forming an uninterrupted mural precipice for the length of several hundred miles, he yielded to the invincible obstacles of nature, and returned to more genial climes. It is worthy of notice, that Sir James Clark Ross had accompanied Parry on his sledge-expedition to the North Pole, and thus acquired the unique distinction of having approached _both_ poles nearer than any other man.

Whether the lands discovered by Wilkes, d'Urville, Biscoe, Balleny, and Ross form a continuous continent, or belong to a large group of islands behind which an open sea extends to the very Pole, is a question which most likely will never be solved, as its determination can never be of the least use to mankind.

The numerous scientific voyages of circumnavigation achieved during the course of the present century are far more important, with regard to the welfare and progress of humanity, than the researches which have been made in the icy wildernesses of the north and south. New lands and isles of great extent have indeed not been discovered by these expeditions, but they have contributed not less largely to the advancement of geography and the natural sciences.

The wonders of oceanic life have first been shown in a more distinct light by the labours of Chamisso, Meyen, Lesson, Darwin, Gray, Hooker, Robinson, Dana, &c., who accompanied Kotzebue, Freycinet, Fitzroy, Ross, &c., on their world-encircling course; and numerous coasts and groups of islands, situated in the remotest seas, and formerly only superficially known, have been accurately measured and traced on the map by the distinguished hydrographers who took part in those far-famed voyages.

INDEX

INDEX.

Aar glacier, formation and dissolution of the, 75 Acalephæ, 348. _See_ Jelly-fishes Acephala, their organisation, 299 -- their food, 305 -- their enemies, 305, 306 Acorn-shell, the, 244 Actiniæ, 361 Actinozoa, 363 Adriatic, depth of the, 8 -- tides of the, 43 Africa, length of coast-line of, 4 -- circumnavigated by the Phœnicians, 444 -- Hanno's discoveries on the west coast of, 444 Agar-agar, or artificial edible birds'-nests of Java, 402 Agricola, Julius, sails round Scotland, 422 Air-bladder of fishes, 189 Air-currents. _See_ Winds Albatross, 163 Albion, New, discovery of, 467 Alcyonarians, 363 Alexander the Great, maritime discoveries resulting from the conquests of, 447 Alexandria, the Pharus or lighthouse of, 89 Algæ, 390 -- changes produced by, in the colour of the sea, 19 -- Russian official collecting, 392 Alligators, 172 Amalfi, maritime trade of, 449 -- decline of, 449 Amazon river, tides of the, 43 -- -- quantity of water which it pours into the ocean, 75 -- -- discovery of the river, 460 America, length of coast-line of, 4 -- salmon of Russian America, 221 -- discovery of, by Columbus, 457 -- account of early navigation along the shores of, 457 Amerigo Vespucci, his discoveries, 460 Ammodyte, or launce, 230 Ammonites, 437 Amœbæ, 379 -- simplicity of their structure, 380 Anabas of the dry tanks, 193 Anchovy, 214 Angler, or sea-devil, 203 Annelides, marine, 262 -- general remarks on the, 262 -- their beauty, 263 -- their food, 264 -- their enemies, 265 -- tubicole, 266 Anson, Commodore, his maritime discoveries, 483 Aphrodita, or sea-mouse, 264 Arab commerce and maritime discovery, 452 Arctic discovery, 474, 496 -- winter passed by Barentz, 478 Argand, his improvement in marine illumination, 90 Argonaut, 280 Argus, Scotch or Shetland, 333 Ascidia mammillata, 322 Asia, length of coast-line of, 4 Asteriæ, 335 Astræa, 373 Atlantic Ocean, depth of the, according to Maury, 7 -- -- temperature of the, 14 -- -- fury of the Atlantic surge, 28, 29 -- -- enormous fucus banks, or floating meadows of the, 397 Atolls, or lagoon islands, 374 Auburn, site of the village of, 29 Auks, 151, 168 Australia, length of coast-line of, 4 -- discoveries in, 480, 486 Avosets, 143, 144, 146 Azores, discovery of the, 456

Back's arctic voyages, 507 Baffin, his maritime discoveries, 483 Baffin's Bay, discovery of, 483 Balani, 244 Balanus ovularis, 244 -- balanoides, 244 Balboa, Vasco Nuñez de, sketch of him and his discoveries, 464 Baleen of the whale, 98 Balleny, his discoveries, 509 Baltic, depth of the, 8 Band-worm, the great, 264 Barentz, William, his maritime discoveries, 476 Barnacles, 244 -- their attacks on the whale, 17 Barnacle goose, 146 Barrow's Straits, discovery of, 505 Basaltic pillars of Fingal's Cave, 46 Bassora, foundation of the town of, 452 Bastidas, Roderigo de, his maritime discoveries, 461 Beachy Head, 5 Bear, white, said to attack the whale, 100 -- organisation of the polar bear, 10 -- attacks Barentz's men, 478 Bear Islands, discovery of, 477 Behring, his maritime discoveries and death, 484 Belemnites, 437 Bellrock lighthouse, 28, 86 -- -- height of the waves at the, 28 -- -- in the storm of 1807, 29 Benin, discovery of, 456 Bermudas, depth of the sea near the, 7 Bird Island, discovery of, 490 Bird's-foot sea-star, 335 Birds'-nests, edible, of Java, 399 -- mode of gathering them, 399 -- agar-agar, or artificial birds'-nests, 402 Birds of passage, 171 Birkenhead, the Great Float at, 91 Biscoe, his discoveries, 509 Bivalves, or acephalous mollusca. _See_ Acephala Black-skimmer, or cut-water, the, 144 Blocks, erratic, of Greenland and Spitzbergen, 76 Bojador, Cape, doubling of, for the first time, 455 Bonito, the, 223, 224 Booth, Mr. Felix, 503 Boothia Felix, discovery of, 503 Borda, his improvements in marine illumination, 90 Borer, the, 231 Botallack, submarine mine, 91 Botrylli, 324 Bougainville, his maritime discoveries, 483 Boundaries of the ocean. _See_ Limits of the ocean Brachiopods, 315 Brazils, discovery of the, 460 Breakwater of Cherbourg, 90 -- of Plymouth, 90 -- moles of Portland, Holyhead, ind Alderney, 90 Bream, sea, 415 Bristol Channel, high tides of the, 38 -- -- marine fauna, 414 Britannia Tubular Bridge, 91 Bryozoa, 316 Buchan, Captain, his arctic discoveries, 497 Buffadero, the marine cave of the, 52 Bullhead, river, its parental affection, 195 Burgomaster-bird, 159 Butthorn, the, 335 Byron, Commodore, his maritime discoveries, 483

Cabot, John and Sebastian, their discoveries, 459 Cachalot, or sperm-whale, its organisation, 102-104 -- its food, 104 Ca'ing whale, the, 115 Calamary, 272 Caledonia, New, discovery of, 490 California, discovery of, 472 Callao, colour of the sea near, 20 Calling crabs, 250, 251 Calms, or doldrums, causes of, 67 Calycophoridæ, 352 Canada acquired by France, 461 Canary Islands probably known to the Phœnicians, 444 Cano, Sebastian el, first performs the circumnavigation of the globe, 469 Cape de Verd Islands, depth of the sea near the, 7 Capelins, 162 Capri, 'azure cave' at, 18, 49 Carcinas mænas, metamorphosis of, 258 Caribbean Sea, crystalline clearness of the, 21 Carinaria, 287 Carrigeen (Chondrus crispus), 399 Carteret, his maritime discoveries, 483 Cartier, Jacques, voyages of, 461 Caryophyllia, 370 Cat-fish, or sea-wolf, 415 Catalonians, their maritime discoveries, 452 Caves, marine, 45 -- Fingal's Cave, 45-48 -- azure cave of Capri, 18, 49 -- the Antro di Nettuno, 49 -- the Cave of Hunga, 49-51 -- cave of the Skerries, 51 -- the Souffleur, or Blower, 52 -- the Buffadero, 53 Caviar, 217 Cellulariæ, 319 Cephalopods, their organisation, 271 -- their locomotion, 274 -- their food, 277 -- their enemies, 277 -- their great size in some cases, 379 -- the Norwegian kraken, 279 -- the argonaut, 280 -- the nautilus, 281 -- the cephalopods of the primitive ocean, 282 Cessart, De, his breakwater at Cherbourg, 90 Cetaceans, general remarks on the organisation of the, 95 -- food of whales, 98 -- their enemies, 99 -- large Greenland whale, 101 -- the rorqual, or fin-back, 101 -- the antarctic smooth-back, 102 -- sperm-whale, 102 -- the narwhal, or unicorn-fish, 106 -- the dolphin, 107 -- the porpoise, 108 -- the grampus, 108 -- history of the whale-fishery, 109 -- the ca'ing whale, 115 Cetochilus australis, banks of the, in the Pacific, 21 Ceylon, or Taprobane, discovery of, 447 Chætodon rostratus, 203 Chancellor's discovery of the White Sea, 474 -- his death, 475 Charybdis, vortex of, 41 Chelura tenebrans, 247 Chelyosoma, 323 Chepstow, high tides at, 38 Cherbourg, breakwater of, 90 Chili, upheaving of the coast of, 10 Chincha Islands, statistics of the guano trade of the, 169 Chiton squamosa, 285 Chlorospermeæ, or green sea-weeds, 391 Chondrus crispus, or carrigeen, 399 Circumnavigation of the globe first performed by Sebastian el Cano, 469 Clavellina producta, 322 Climate, influence of the Gulf Stream on that of the west European coasts, 51 -- variety of climates in similar latitudes, 52 -- Peruvian cold stream, 53 -- Japanese stream, 54 -- influence of forests on climates, 78 -- power of man over climate, 78 Climbing fishes, 193 Clio borealis, 298 Clouds, formation of, 71, 72 Coast-line of the sea, length of, 4 Coasts, different formation of, 5 -- destructive power of the sea on all, 29 Cockle, the, 303, 306 Cocoa-nut crab of the East Indies, 254 Cod, the, 415 -- curing the cod, 216 -- cod-liver oil, 216 Cœlenterata, 345, 357 Colæus of Samos, his maritime discoveries, 446 Colour of the sea, 17 -- the azure cave at Capri, 18 -- changes produced by algæ and sea-worms, 19 Columbus, his discovery of America, 457 Compass, mariner's, invention of the, 451 Composition of sea-water, 12 Cone-shell, orange, 288 Conger-eels, 222 Congo, discovery of, 456 Constructions, marine, 80-91 Cook, Captain, his voyages and discoveries, 485 -- his first voyage, 486 -- discovery of the Society Islands, 486 -- of the east coast of New Holland, 486 -- his second voyage, and discoveries, 492 -- his third voyage, 491 -- his death, 462 Cook's Strait, discovery of, 486 Conochilus volvox, 268 Coral, spotted, of the Indian Ocean, 21 Coral, 366 -- deep sea, 367 -- fishing of the Mediterranean, 367 Coral-reefs, 374 -- barrier-reef of Australia, 374 -- how they become habitable for man, 375, 376 Coralline zone, 413 Cordova, his discoveries, 491 Cormorants, 154, 155 Cortereal, Gaspar, his maritime discoveries, 460 Cortereal, John Vaez, his discoveries, 458 Cortereal, Miguel, 461 Cortes, his conquest of Mexico, 461 Coryniadæ, 358 Crabs, 246 -- legs of crabs, 251 -- larvæ of crabs, 258 Cross-fish, the common, 334 Crustacea, by what are they distinguished from the insects and spiders? 243 -- their respiratory organs, 244 Ctenophora, 358 Cuba discovered, 459 -- circumnavigated for the first time, 461 Curlew, the, 143 Currents, ocean, 54 -- causes of, 54, 55 -- the equatorial stream, 56 -- the Gulf Stream, 57 -- influence of the Gulf Stream, 60 -- the cold Peruvian stream, 62 -- the Japanese stream, 63 -- beneficial influence of the ocean currents, 64 Cushion star-fishes, 335 Cuttle-fish, 275 -- ova of the, 278 Cuvier's classification of fishes, 188 Cyclobranchiata, 285 Cyclones, causes of, 68 Cymospiras, 266

Dampier, his maritime discoveries, 483 Darien, Gulf of, discovered, 461 Darwin's theory of the formation of lagoon islands, 375 Davis, John, his maritime discoveries, 476 Depth of the sea, 6 -- of the Atlantic, according to Maury, 7 -- American mode of sounding in deep water, 6 -- telegraphic plateau between Newfoundland and Ireland, 7 -- measurement of depth by the rapidity of tide-wave, 8 Dew, formation of, 68 Diatomaceæ, 402 -- their importance in reference to the existence of animal life in high latitudes, 403 Diaz, Bartholomew, his discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, 476 Diazona violacea, 324 Diodons, 178 Diogenes hermit-crab, 254 Diphyes, 352 Discovery, maritime, progress of, 441. _See_ Maritime Discovery Diu, Portuguese settlement of, 462 Divers, 150 Docks of London and Liverpool, 91 Dogfish, 200 Dolphins, 107 Donax, 301 Dory, 242 Dragon-weever, 204 Drake, Sir Francis, his discoveries, 473 Duck family, 146 Dugong, 117 -- skeleton of the, 118 -- female dugong of Ceylon, 119 Dunes, formation of, 5 Dunwich, destruction of the coast at, 30 d'Urville, Dumont, his discoveries, 509 Dusky Bay, discovery of, 487 Dutch, their attempts to discover a North-West passage to India, 474, 476

Earth-rind, the giant book of the, 432 -- formation of a solid earth-crust by cooling, 432 Echinus, or sea-urchin, 337 -- mammillated, 338 -- edible, 338 -- dental apparatus of sea-urchins, 339 Eddystone lighthouse, the, 81 -- Winstanley's structure, 81 -- Rudyerd's, 82 -- Smeaton's, 83 Edward's Island, Prince, discovery of, 491 -- Land, 415 Eel, the common, 225 -- conger, 228 -- the murry, or muræna, 229 Eendragt's Land, discovery of, 480 Eider-duck, 146 Electric eel, 202 Endeavour Strait, discovery of, 486 Enderby Land, discovery of, 509 English navigation, retrospective view of, 459 -- attempts to discover the North-West passage, 474 Enteromorphæ, 391 Eolis coronata, 284 Eozoon canadense, 381 _note_ Equatorial ocean-current, 57 Equinoctial line crossed for the first time, 456 Erebus, Mount, discovery of, 509 Escharæ, 317 Espiritu Santo, discovery of the Archipelago of, 480, 490 Esquimaux in his kayak, 120 Euripus, phenomenon produced by the tides of the, 44 Europe, length of coast-line of, 4 Euryale, warted, 333 Evaporation, movement of the waters through, 65 Extent of the ocean, 1

Falkland Islands, sea-weeds at, 396 Fan-bearer, 402, 403 Feather-star, the rosy, 330 Fernandez, Juan, his discoveries, 473 Fierasfer, 340 File-fish, 232 Fin-crab, spotted, 252 Fin-fish, or northern rorqual, 101 Fingal's Cave, 45-48 -- -- popular belief as to its workmanship, 48 -- -- Sir W. Scott's description of it, 48 Fire, sea of, 434 Fish, consumption of, in London, 237 _note_ Fish River, Great, course of, traced, 507 Fishes, general remarks on, 186 -- their locomotive organs, 187 -- Cuvier's classification of fishes, 188 _note_ -- fins, 188 -- air-bladder, 189 -- skin of, 190 -- beauty of tropical, 191 -- gills of, 191 -- circulation of the blood of, 191, 192 -- climbing, 193 -- parental affection of, 194 -- organs of sense, 196 -- offensive weapons of, 198 -- numerous enemies of, 207 -- luminous, 422 Flamingoes, 142 Flat-fishes, 235 Florence, its commercial grandeur, 450 Flounder, 238 Flying-fishes, 156, 205, 224 Flying-gurnard, 206 Foraminifera, 378 -- their immense numbers, 378 -- simplicity of their structure, 380 -- various forms of Foraminifera, 381 Forbes, Professor Edward, on the four zones of marine life on the British coasts, 408 Forests, influence of, on the formation and retention of atmospherical precipitations, 76 -- formation of, 77 -- influence of, on climates, 78 Franklin, Sir John, his arctic voyages, 501 -- his last voyage, 508 Fresnel, his improvements in marine illumination, 90 Frigate-bird, 155 Frobisher, Martin, his maritime discoveries, 475 Frog-fish, 193, 194 Fuci, 392 -- fucus banks, or floating meadows, of the Atlantic 397 Fulmar, the, 195

Gades, Phœnician town of, 444 Gaëta, maritime trade of, 451 Gama, Vasco de, doubles the Cape of Good Hope, 462 Gannet, or soland goose, 156 Gar-fish, 223 Garry, Cape, discovery of, 503 Gasteropods, 282 -- respiratory apparatus, 283 -- growth of their shells, 289 -- mode of locomotion, 289 -- their food, 294 -- organs of sense, 295 -- their enemies, 297 -- their use to man, 296 Genoa, maritime grandeur of, 450 Geographical distribution of marine life, 405 Georgia, South, discovery of, 490 Germany, its climate at the time of the Romans and at the present time, 78 Glaciers, formation and dissolution of, 75 -- the Aar glacier, 75 -- of Greenland and Spitzbergen, 76 Glaucus, 283 Globe-fish, 232 Goa, Portuguese settlement of, 462 Goby, the black, 194 Goniaster, 335, 336 Good Hope, Cape of, discovery of, 457 -- -- first doubled, 462 Goodwin Sands, 9 Goose, sea, various kinds of, 146 Gorgonidæ, 365 Grampus, the, 108 -- -- anecdote of one, 109 Grass wrack (Zostera marina), 391 Great crab, 251 Grebes, the, 150 Greenland, depression of the coast of, 10 -- olive colour of the water of the Greenland seas, 20 -- glaciers of, 76 -- whale-fishery of, 110 -- discovery of, 457 Grijalva, his maritime discoveries, 461 Guano of the Chincha Islands, 169 -- statistics of the trade of, 170 Guillemot, black, 165, 167 Guinea, New, discovery of, 473 Gulf Stream, the, 57, 58 -- -- its influence on the climate of the west European coasts, 59 Gulls, sea, 157 Günnbjorn, his discovery of Greenland, 457 Gurnard, 414

Haddock, 215 Hag. glutinous, 231 Haiti discovered, 459 Halibut, 236 Hanno, the Carthaginian, his voyage, 444 Harp-shell, 288 Hartburn, site of the village of, 29 Hartog, his maritime discoveries, 480 Hassar, land journeys of the, 194 Hawaii, discovery of the island of, 492 Hebrides, New, discovery of the, 480, 490 Henry, Prince, of Portugal, his maritime discoveries, 453 Hermit-crabs, 254 Herrings, 208, 415 Herring-crab, 256 Herring-fishery, 208 -- history of the, 209 -- statistics of the, 210 Herring-gull, 158 Hervey's Islands, discovery of, 487 Hindustan, circumnavigation of, 447 Hippocamp, 129, 234 Hippopus, 315 Hoar-frost, causes of, 72 Hogg, James, his experiments with salmon, 219 Holland, devastations caused by storm-tides on the coast of, 35 Holland, New, discoveries of, 473 -- -- Cook's discoveries in, 486 Holothuriæ, 339 Homer, his picture of the breaking of the waves against the shore, 27 Hood's Island, discovery of, 489 Hooded seal of northern seas, 125 Huatulco, sea-cave of, 52, 53 Hudson, Henry, his maritime discoveries, 481 -- his unfortunate end, 482 Hudson's Bay, discovery of, 481 Hump-back whales, 102 Hunga, cave of, 49-51 Hyalæa, 298 Hyde, site of the village of, 29

Ianthinæ, 290 Ice-bear, 100, 134 Icebergs, formation of, 76 -- erratic blocks carried away by, 76 Iceland, salmon of, 220 -- discovery and colonisation of, 361 Ichthyosaurus, 438 Inachus Kæmpferi of Japan, 259 India, Portuguese discovery in, 462 Indian Ocean, spotted corals in the, 21 Indus, sudden rising of the spring-tide at the mouth of the, 42 Inferobranchiata, 284 Infusoria, marine, 383 Insects, marine, 261 Isinglass, 216 Isis hippuris, 369 Ivory of the walrus, 132

Jamaica discovered, 459 Japanese ocean-stream, the, 63 Java, gathering of edible birds'-nests on the south coast of, 399 Jelly-fishes, 345 -- their anatomical structure, 345 -- their size and colours, 356 -- their indirect use to man, 357 -- their phosphorescence, 420 -- the Velella, 353 -- the Portuguese man-of-war, 354 John Dory, 415

Kamtschatka, salmon of, 220 Keeling Island, subsidence of the coast at, 10 Kerguelen's Land, discovery of, 491 Kilda, St., bird-catching on, 164 King-crab, 246 Kittiwake, or tarrock, the, 158 Kraken, the Norwegian, 279

Labrador, discovery of, 459 Ladrone Islands, discovery of the, 468 Lagoon islands, 374 -- -- Darwin's theory of the formation of, 375 -- -- how they became habitable for man, 376 Lamantins of the Atlantic Ocean, 117 Laminaria, region of the great, or tangle forests, 393 Laminariæ, 393 Lampreys, 230, 231 Land-crabs, 250 Landscapes, submarine, 21 -- in the Caribbean Sea, 21 -- on the coast of Sicily, 21 La Perouse, his maritime discoveries, 493 -- -- his fate, 493 Launces, 230 Le Maire, his maritime discoveries, 480 Lepraliæ, 318 Lessonias, of the Falkland Islands, 396 Level of the ocean, does it remain unchanged, and every where the same? 11 Licmophora, or fan-bearer, 402 Life, marine, geographical distribution of, 405 -- dependence of all created beings upon space and time, 406 -- influences which regulate the distribution of marine life, 407 -- the four bathymetrical zones of marine life on the British coasts, according to the late Professor Edward Forbes, of Edinburgh, 408 -- first wakening of life in the bosom of the ocean, 435 Lighthouses, 80 -- the Eddystone lighthouse, 81 -- the Bellrock, or Inchcape, lighthouse, 85 -- the Skerryvore lighthouse, 85-89 -- the Pharus of Alexandria, 89 -- progress of marine illumination, 90 Lily encrinites, 340 Limacina arctica, 298 Limits of the ocean, progressive changes in the, 9 -- Goodwin Sands, 10 -- alluvial deposits, 10 -- upheaving of coasts, 10 -- subsidence, 10 -- temple of Serapis, 11 -- level of the sea everywhere the same, 11 Limnoriæ, 247 Limpet, 285, 294 Limuli, or king-crabs, 246 Ling, 215, 415 Ling-thorn, 335 Lithophytes, 373 Liverpool Docks, 91 Lizards of the sea, 173, 181 -- serpent-lizard, 435 Lobsters, 256, 257 Loggerheaded duck or goose, 148 London Docks, 91 Long-tailed duck, 148 Lophobranchii, the, 233 Louse, whale, 101 Lucernaridæ, 350 Luminous marine animals, 418 Lump-sucker, 415

Mackerel, 222 Macrocystis pyrifera, 393 -- -- Mr. Darwin's description of it at Tierra del Fuego, 393, 396 Madeira, depth of the sea near, 1 -- discovery of, 505 Maelstrom, the, 41 Magellan, Ferdinand, his discoveries, 467, 468 Magellan's Straits, discovery of, 468 -- -- harmony of animal life in the islands of, 490 Magilus antiquus, 291 Malacca Islands, discovery of the, 462 Malo, St., high tides of, 38 Mammaria scintillans, 275 Manatee, the, 116 Mantis crab, spotted, 256 Marco Polo, his travels and discoveries, 453 Maritime discovery, progress of, 441 -- discoveries of the Phœnicians, 443 -- expedition of Hanno, 444 -- circumnavigation of Africa, under Pharaoh Necho II., 444 -- Ophir, 339 -- Colæus of Samos and Pytheas of Massilia, 340 -- expedition of Nearchus, 447 -- circumnavigation of Hindostan, under the Ptolemies, 447 -- voyages of discovery of the Romans, 453 -- consequences of the fall of the Roman empire, 448 -- Amalfi, 449 -- Pisa, Venice, and Genoa, 449 -- resumption of maritime intercourse between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 451 -- discovery of the compass, 451 -- Marco Polo, 453 -- other discoveries, 453 -- Prince Henry of Portugal, 454 -- discovery of Porto Santo and Madeira, 455 -- doubling of Cape Bojador, 455 -- discovery of the Azores, 456 -- the line crossed for the first time, 456 -- Benin and Congo discovered, 456 -- and the Cape of Good Hope, 457 -- discovery of America, 457 -- and of Iceland, 457 -- Greenland, 457 -- discoveries of John and Sebastian Cabot, 459 -- retrospective view of the beginnings of English navigation, 461 -- Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci, 460 -- Vincent Yañez Pinson, 460 -- Cortes, 461 -- Verazzani, 461 -- Jacques Cartier, 461 -- the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, 462 -- Balboa's discovery of the Pacific Ocean, 466 -- Magellan, 467 -- Sebastian el Cano, the first circumnavigator of the globe, 469 -- Pizarro and Cortes, 470 -- Urdaneta, 472 -- Juan Fernandez, 473 -- Mendoza, 473 -- Drake, 473 -- Willoughby and Chancellor, 474 -- Martin Frobisher, 475 -- Davis, 476 -- Barentz, 476 -- Quiros, 480 -- Torres, 480 -- Schouten, Le Maire, and others, 480 -- Tasman, 480 -- Henry Hudson, and his unfortunate end, 481 -- Baffin, 481 -- Dampier, 483 -- Anson, Behring, Byron, Wallis, Carteret, and Bougainville, 483 -- Cook's voyages, 485-492 -- arctic discovery, 496 Marquesas de Mendoza Islands, discovery of the, 473 Mauritius, sea-cave on the, 52 Mediterranean Sea, depth of the, 8 -- -- height of the, 12 -- -- temperature of the, 14 -- -- colour of the, 18 -- -- sides of the, 43 -- -- Phœnician trade in the, 443 -- -- decline of trade in the, 33 -- -- resumption of maritime intercourse between the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, 449 Medusidæ, 349, 350 Melanospermeæ, or olive-coloured sea-weeds, 392 Melville Island, discovery of, 500 Mendana, Alvaro, his discoveries, 473 Menezes, Don Jorge de, his discoveries, 473 Merganser, 149, 404 Mexico, discovery of the coast of, 461 -- conquest of, by Cortes, 461, 472 Microscopic life of the ocean, 378 Mines, submarine, 91 Mitre shells, 288 Mollusca, 270 -- general remarks on, 270 Monsoons, north-east, 68 -- south-west, 68 Moon, influence of the, on the tides, 446 Mother-of-pearl, 313 Mullet, grey, 415 Murex haustellum, 291 Murry, or muræna, 229 Mussels, edible, 307 -- history of, 307 -- 'bouchots,' or mussel-parks, 307 Myxine, the, 231

Naples, maritime trade of, 449 Narwhal, or unicorn-fish, 106 Nautilus, 280 -- the pearly, 281 Nearchus, voyage of, 447 Necho II., Pharaoh, of Egypt, his maritime discoveries, 444 Nelson, Horatio, pursuing a polar bear, 138 Neptune's ruffles, 318 Nereis, the, 263 Nereocystis lutkeana, the, of Norfolk Bay and Sitcha, 397 Nettuno, Antro di, 49 Newfoundland, discovery of, 459 Noctiluca miliaris, 419 Norfolk, rapid destruction of the cliffs of, 29 Norfolk Island, discovery of, 490 North Sea, depth of the, 8 -- -- colour of the, 18 North-West Passage, attempts of the Dutch and English to discover the, 474 Norway, treaty of commerce concluded with, 459 Nova Zembla, 476, 477 -- -- sufferings of Barentz and his crew during a winter at, 478 Nudibranchiata, 284 Nummulina discoidalis, 378

Oar-weeds, 393 Ocean, the primitive, 433 Ojeda, discoveries of, 460 Oliva hispidula, 290 Onychoteuthis, arms and tentacles of an, 274 Ophir, the, of the Phœnicians, 445 Ophiuridæ, or snake-stars, 331 Orkney Islands, whirlpools among the, 42 Ormus, taken by the Portuguese, 462 Ostend, oyster-parks of, 309 Otarian seals, 126 Oyster, 307 -- account of the oyster-trade, 308 -- catchers, 143 -- oyster-dust, 310 -- pearl, 311

Pacific Ocean, depth of the, 7 -- -- height of the, 12 -- -- discovery of the, 466 -- -- Cook's voyages in, 492 Paguri, 254 Palisser Islands, discovery of the, 489 Palmas, Cape, colour of the sea near, 20 Palmyra, 445 Parrot-fishes, 372 Parry, Sir John, his arctic discoveries, 500 Patagonia, discovery of, 484 Pea-crab, 253 Pearl-oyster, 311 Pearls, 311, 312 Pectinibranchiata, 288 Pectunculus, 302 Pegasus, swimming, 207 Pelamid, 224 Pelamys bicolor, 183 Pelicans, 116, 154 Penguins, 142, 152 -- species of, 153 Pentacrinus briareus, 330 Periwinkle, 411 Peru, visited by Pizarro, 471 -- conquered by him, 472 Peruvian ocean-current, the, 62 Petrels, 160 -- stormy, 162 Philippine Islands, discovery of the, 468 Philodina roseola, 269 Phœnicians, maritime discoveries of the, 443 -- their progress in the arts and sciences, 445 Pholades, 304 Pholas dactylus, 301 -- Pliny's accounts of its phosphorescence, 431 -- striata, 302 Phosphorescence of the sea, causes of, 418 -- of various marine animals, 418 Phyllosoma, 258 Physaliæ, the, 354 Physophoridæ, 353 Pilchards, 212, 415 Pilot-fish, 225 Pinnæ of the Mediterranean, 253, 304, 305 Pinson, his discoveries, 460 Pipe-fishes, 233, 234 Pisa, maritime trade of, 449 Pizarro, sketch of him and his companions, 469 Plaice, 238 Plants, marine, 390 Plectognaths, 232 Plesiosaurus, the, 438 Pleuronectidæ, or flat-fishes, 235 Pliny, his geographical knowledge, 448 Plover, the, 144 Plymouth breakwater, in the great storm of 1824, 29 Polycystina, 382, 383 Polynesia, length of coast-line of, 4 Polyps, 345 Polyzoa, 316, 320 Porcupine-fish, 232 Porpoise, 108 Portland, destructive action of the sea at, 31 Porto Santo, discovery of, 455 Portuguese man-of-war, 354 Poulp, 272, 273 Prontzchitschew, his maritime discoveries, 483 Protozoa, 378 Pteroceras, 290 Pteropods, their organisation and mode of life, 298 -- the butterflies of the ocean, 299 Ptolemies, maritime discoveries of the, 447 Ptolemy, the geographer, his knowledge of the globe, 449 Ptygura melicerta, 267 Puffins, 165, 167 Purbeck, destruction of the cliffs at, 31 Pyrosoma atlantica, its phosphorescence, 420 Pyrosomes, 325 Pytheas of Massilia, his maritime discoveries, 446

Quantity of the waters contained within the bosom of the ocean, 8 Quiros, his maritime discoveries, 480 Quito, coast of, discovery of, 470

Racer, or rider-crab, the, 251 Rain, formation of, 72 -- inequality of, 72 -- its return to the sea, 73 Rays, 240 Razor-shell, 303-306 Ré, oyster-trade of, 311 Reculver, destruction of the coast at, 30 Red Sea, height of the, 12 -- -- red algæ of the, 20 -- -- Phœnician trade on the, 445 Reef-building corals, 374 Regent Inlet, Prince, discovery of, 500 Reptiles of the sea, 172 Rhodosperms, Florideæ, or red sea-weeds, 398 -- their habitat, 398 Richardson, Sir John, his arctic voyages, 501 Rivers, phenomena presented by the mixture of salt and fresh water in, 16 -- quantities of water which rivers pour into the ocean, 75 Rock-goose, 149 Roggewein, his maritime discoveries, 483 Rome, ancient, maritime discoveries of, 448 Rorqual, northern, or fin-fish, 101 -- its food, 102 Ross, Sir James, on the height of waves, 28 -- -- -- his discoveries, 509 -- -- John, his arctic discoveries, 500, 503 Rotifera, the, 267 Rudyerd, Mr., his lighthouse on the Eddystone rocks, 82

Saavedra, Alvaro de, his discoveries, 473 Sabrina Land, discovery of, 509 Sagittaria, discovery of the island of, 480 Sail-fluke, 239 Salangana caves in Java, 399 Salmon, 217, 324 -- trade, 220 -- salmon-spearing, 219 -- growth of the salmon, 219 -- abundance of salmon, 220 -- introduced into Australia and New Zealand, 221 Salmon-leaps, 218 Salpæ, 325 -- their alternating generations, 327 Salts of the sea, 12 Sand-crab, American, 252 Sandhopper, 246 Sand-stars, 332 Sandwich Land, discovery of, 490 -- Islands, discovery of, 490 Sardinia, stalactite caves of the island of, 49 Sargasso Sea, the, 397 Saurians of the past seas, 172, 438 Scari, or parrot-fishes, 372 Schouten, his maritime discoveries, 480 Scissor-bill, 144 Scoopers, 143 Scoresby, his arctic voyages, 497 Scyllæa, 283 Scythe, the, 415 Sea-anemones, 361 Sea-bear, 117, 126 Sea-birds, 128, 142 -- their vast numbers, 142 Sea-cask, 142 Sea-cucumbers, 339 Sea-devil of the Pacific, 241 Sea-ear, 286, 287 Sea-elephant, 125 Sea-fox, 99 Sea-hare, 284, 295 Sea-horse, 129, 234 Sea-lemon, 284 Sea-lion, 128 Sea-mat, leaf-like, 316 Sea-mew, 157 Sea-otter, 139 -- chase of the, 139 Sea-pen, 364 -- its phosphorescence, 426 Sea-pie, the, 144 Sea-pinks, 391 Sea-scurfs, 318 Sea-snail, purple, 290 Sea-snakes, 183 Sea-squirts, 323 Sea-swallows, 157 Sea-urchin, 337 Sea-weeds, 391 -- luminous, 423 Sea-wolf, 197 Seals and walruses, 117 -- food of, 120 -- statistics of seal-fishery, 121 -- various kinds of, 123 Seine, sudden rising of the spring-tides at the mouth of the, 42 Seleucidæ, maritime discoveries of the, 42 Seleucus Nicator, his circumnavigation of Hindostan, and discovery of Taprobane, or Ceylon, 447 Semen Deshnew, the Cossack, his maritime discoveries, 483 Sepia. _See_ Cuttle-fish Serapis, temple of, 11 Serpents of the seas, 183 Serpulas, 266 Sertularia, 347 Shakspeare's Cliff, destructive action of the sea on, 30 Sharks, 198 -- Greenland shark, an enemy of the whale, 99 -- luminous, 330 Sheldrake, or burrow duck, 148 Sheppey, Isle of, rapid decay of the coast of the, 30 Sherringham, ravages of the sea on the coast at, 29 Shetland Islands, fury of the Atlantic waves at the, 28 Shetland, New South, discovery of, 509 Ship-worm (teredo), 302 Shore-crab, 251 Siberia, Cook's visits to the coasts of, 492 Sicily, submarine landscapes of the coast of, 21 Siphonostomata, 245 Skerries, cave in the, 51 Skerryvore lighthouse, 85 Skimmer, 169 Sledge-journey, arctic, 502 Sly, 202 Smeaton, John, his lighthouse on the Eddystone rocks, 83 Smooth-back whale, the antarctic, 102 Snake-stars, 437 Snow-goose, 146 Society Islands, discovery of the, 486 Soland goose, 156 Solasters, 334 Sole, 237 -- skin of the, 190 Solen, or razor-shell, 304 Solis, Juan de, his discoveries, 461 -- -- -- his death, 461 Solomon Islands, discovery of the, 473, 483 Souffleur, or blower, the marine cave of the, 52 Soundings, American method of taking, in deep water, 6 South Sea Islands, discovery of the, 474 Speckled diver, 145 Sperm-whale, or cachalot, 102 Spiders, marine, 260 Spitzbergen, discovery of, 477 Spondylus, royal, 314 Sponge-crab, 249 Sponges, 385 -- their remarkable growth, 385 -- habitat of the common sponge, 388 Sprat, the, 214 Springs, origin of, 73 -- mineral waters, 74 Springs of fresh water in the bottom of the sea, 17 Staffa, island of, 46 Stalactite caves of the island of Sardinia, 49 Star-fishes, 328 -- their organisation, 328 Star-gazer fish, 202 Sterlet of the Volga, 217 Stevenson, Mr. Alan, his Skerryvore lighthouse, 86 Stevenson, Mr. Robert, his lighthouse on the Bell Rock, 85 Stickleback, parental affection of the, 195 Stone-corals, 373 Storm, the great, of 1703, 82 Storm-tides, 34 -- devastations of, on flat coasts, 34, 35 Strand-birds, 143 -- migration of, 144 -- food of, 144 Strombus pes pelicani, 290 Sturgeons, 216, 217 -- caviar, 217 Sucking-fish, 203 Suffolk, rapid decay of the cliffs of, 29 Sun-fish, 232, 233 -- its luminousness, 422 Sun, his influence on the tides, 37 Sun-star fish, 334 Surgeon-fish, the, 205 Sweden, gradual upheaving of the coast of, 10 Sword-fish, an enemy of the whale, 99 -- his weapon, 201 Synchæta baltica, 269

Tahiti, discovery of, 484 Tailor-bird, the, 143 Taprobane, or Ceylon, discovery of, 447 Tartessus, Phœnician town of, 444 Tasman, Abel, his maritime discoveries, 480 Tasmania, discovery of, 481 Tectibranchiata, 284 Temperature of the sea, 13 -- at various parts of the surface of the globe, 14 Teredo navalis, 302 Thames, progress of the tide-wave in the, 43 Thornbacks, 240 Thresher, or sea-fox, an enemy of the whale, 99 Thunder-stones, 437 Tide-wave, measurement of the depth of the sea by the rapidity of the, 8 -- progress and course of the, 40, 43 Tides, the, 32 -- description of the phenomenon, 32 -- devastations of storm-floods on flat coasts, 34, 35 -- knowledge of the ancients respecting the tides, 35 -- fundamental causes of the tides revealed by Kepler and Newton, 36, 37 Tides, height of the, at various places, 38 -- vortices caused by the: the Maelstrom, Charybdis, &c., 41 -- the phenomena of the Euripus, 44 Tierra del Fuego, masses of sea-weed at, 394 -- -- -- rounded by Schouten and Le Maire, 480 Tonga, discovery of, 481 Top, agglutinating, 296 Tornadoes, causes of, 68 Tornatella fasciata, 290 Torpedo, the, 201 Torres, his maritime discoveries, 480 Torso Rock, the, 9 Tortoise-shell, 180 Tortoises, 176 Trade-winds, the, 67 Transparency of the sea at Capri, 18 -- -- -- -- in the Indian Ocean, 21 -- -- -- -- in the Caribbean, 21 Trepang, or Biche de Mer, 340 -- mode of curing, 340 -- the fishery in the Feejee Islands, 342 Tridacna, the gigantic, 314 Trigger-fish, 233 Trilobites, 436 Trunk-fish, 232 Tubiporidæ, 370 Tubulibranchiata, 292 Tunicata, 316, 321 Tunny, the, 221 -- stripe-bellied, 224 Turbot, the, 236, 237 Turn-stone bird, 144 Turtles, 173 -- catching turtles in the island of St. Thomas, 172 Tynemouth Castle, destruction of the coast near, 29 Typhoons, causes of, 68 Tyrian dye, 446

Ulvæ, 391 Unicorn-fish, or narwhal, 106 Urasters, 334 Urdaneta, first reaches Acapulco from Manilla, 472

Vancouver's discoveries, 472 Van Diemen's Land, discovery of, 480 Vanikoro, island of, 493 Velellæ, the, 353 Venice, maritime grandeur of, 450 Verazzani, voyage of, 461 Vermetus, 291 Virgularia mirabilis, 365 Vogtia pentacantha, 353

Wales, Cape Prince of, discovery of, 491 Wallis, his maritime discoveries, 483 Walrus, or morse, 117, 129, 135 -- anecdote of a fight with, 130 -- ivory of the, 132 Walton, his mussel-beds in France, 307 Water-snakes, 183 Water-spouts, causes of, 68 Waves of the ocean, 24 -- wave-motion as distinct from water motion, 25 -- height and velocity of storm-waves, 26-28 -- Homer's picture of the breaking of the waves against the shore, 26 -- Scoresby on the height of waves in the open sea, 27 -- force and height of the waves on rocky coasts, 28 -- instances of the destructive action of the tidal waves on coast-lines, 28-31 Weddell, Captain, his voyages, 509 Weevers, 204 Wellington Channel, discovery of, 500 Wentle-trap, Chinese, 289 Whalebone, 96 Whale-fishery, history of the, 109 Whales. _See_ Cetaceans Whelks, 292 Wilkes, Captain, on the height of waves, 28 Wilkes, his explorations, 509 Willoughby, Sir Hugh, his unfortunate arctic voyage, 474 Winds, origin of, 66 -- trade-winds, 67 -- calms, or doldrums, 67 -- monsoons, 68 -- typhoons, tornadoes, &c., 68 -- water-spouts, 68 Wing-shells, 304 Winstanley, Mr., his lighthouse on the Eddystone rocks, 81 Winter Harbour, discovery of, 500 Wolf-fish, 197 Wolstenholme Sound, elevation of the coast at, 10 Worm-shell, 291

Yorkshire, wearing away of the coast of, 29 Yucatan, first exploration of, 461

Zostera marina, 391

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Transcriber's Note

Minor typos have been corrected. Most words that sometimes have hyphenations and other times non-hyphenated were left as written. Illustrations were repositioned to not split paragraphs. An assumed missing end quotation was added on page 353.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Sea and its Living Wonders, by George Hartwig