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The travellers felt, greatly disconcerted at this discovery; it robbed them at once irretrievably of the honour of being the first discoverers of the North Pole, and showed them that, at some unknown period in the remote past, there must have existed a man, or more probably a body of men, who, not only without the exceptional facilities offered by the possession of such a ship as the Flying Fish, but with, in all probability, ships infinitely inferior to the worst of those used by modern explorers, had actually achieved the hitherto deemed impossible feat of piercing the great ice-barrier and actually reaching the northern pole of the earth.
With the journey all but completed to be thus wrecked upon the wrong side of that precipitous and unscalable wall of rock and ice! I looked at Thuvan Dihn. He but shook his head dejectedly. The balance of the night we spent shivering in our inadequate sleeping silks and furs upon the snow that lies at the foot of the ice-barrier.
Her name burst from his lips in a tone that thrilled her, but with it came a sudden uproar from the distant crowd, and the next instant they saw that the ice-barrier was giving way. The pressure had become irresistible. As the Salmon had risen the ice had risen also, and now the narrow throat was belching its contents forth.
We also had to insure our landing against any possible accident, and, I must add, against any plot on the part of Hearne and others to seize the boat in order to return to the ice-barrier. We placed the long boat in a cavity which would be easy to watch, about thirty feet to the left of the schooner, along with its oars, rudder, compass, anchor, masts and sail.
For five days of cold and suffering and privation we traversed the rough and frozen way which lies at the foot of the ice-barrier. Fierce, fur-bearing creatures attacked us by daylight and by dark. Never for a moment were we safe from the sudden charge of some huge demon of the north. The apt was our most consistent and dangerous foe.
Land was discovered in lat. 66° 30' S. and long. 138° 21' E. With the exception of a few bare islets, the whole of this land was completely covered with snow. It was given the name of Adélie Land, and a part of the ice-barrier lying to the west of it was called C^ote Clarie, on the supposition that it must envelop a line of coast.
Drear and desolate is it in winter, when the straits are filled with ice, which, in the shape of floe, and berg, and pinnacle, pass in ghostly procession to and fro, as the wind wafts them, or they feel the diurnal impetus of the tides they cover, to escape in time from the narrow limits of the pass, and lose themselves in the vast ice-barrier that for five long months shuts out the havens of St.
But, as I have said before, if he has not already made acquaintance with the ice-barrier.” “What makes you think so?” “Everything and nothing, Mr. Jeorling. One feels these things; one doesn’t think them. Hunt is an old sea-dog, who has carried his canvas bag into every corner of the world.”
Well then, that being so, the waters round the Pole must be comparatively warm waters, and also, comparatively, free from ice, so that if we could only manage to cross this ice-barrier and get into them, we might sail right away to the North Pole."
My knowledge of the efforts that had been made by countless expeditions to explore that unknown land bade me to caution, for never had flier returned who had passed to any considerable distance beyond the mighty ice-barrier that fringes the southern hem of the frigid zone.
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