United States or Grenada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then she passed from hand to hand, and dirty hands they were, from the Chu Kiang to the Hoang Ho, and through the Korea Channel into the Japan sea, trading sometimes, smuggling sometimes, and once, as far as the Kuriles, sealing in forbidden waters.
One night, however, as we were nearing the Kuriles again, on our way south, leaving the Sea of Okhotsk, I was sitting on the fore side of the try-works alone, meditating upon what I would do when once I got clear of this miserable business.
The natural result followed. In 1875 Russia found means to eject her partner, the Japanese receiving as compensation undisputed claim to the barren Kuriles, which they already possessed . Even before this further proof of Russia's expansiveness, Japan had seen the need of adapting herself to the new conditions consequent on the advent of the Great Powers in the Far East.
"They'd have no use for fetching up among the Russians, and there's nobody else until you get to Japan. No white men, any way. Besides, from the Behring Sea to the Kuriles is quite a long way." "If you were dumped down ashore there, which way would you go?" Dampier asked.
This girdle is partly terrestrial, partly submarine; and commencing at Mount Erebus, near the Antarctic Pole, ranging through South Shetland Isle, Cape Horn, the Andes of South America, the Isthmus of Panama, then through Central America and Mexico, and the Rocky Mountains to Kamtschatka, the Aleutian Islands, the Kuriles, the Japanese, the Philippines, New Guinea, and New Zealand, reaches the Antarctic Circle by the Balleny Islands.
In the chain of the Kuriles Professor John Milne counted fifty-two well-defined volcanoes, of which nine, perhaps more, are certainly active. They are not so high as those of Kamtschatka; but, on the other hand, they rise from very deep oceanic waters, and have been probably built up from the sea bottom by successive eruptions of tuff, lava, and ash.
"If I'd a wallet full of papers certifying me as a harmless traveller, it would be south just as hard as I could hit the trail. Guess I'd strike somebody out prospecting, or surveying, and they'd set me along to the Kuriles. Still, if I'd been sealing, I wouldn't head that way. No, sir. That's dead sure." There was a reason for this certainty, right or wrong, in the minds of the sealermen.
So we were quite impatient to get along fretting considerably at the persistent fogs which prevented our making much progress while in the vicinity of the Kuriles. But we saw no more bowheads, for which none of us forward were at all sorry.
Word Of The Day