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Wherefore this current being proved to come from the Cape of Good Hope to the strait of Magellan, and wanting sufficient entrance there, is by the necessity of Nature's force brought to Terra de Labrador, where Jacques Cartier met the same, and thence certainly known not to strike over upon Iceland, Lapland, etc., and found by Barnarde de la Torre, in Mare del Sur, on the backside of America, therefore this current, having none other passage, must of necessity fall out through this strait into Mare del Sur, and so trending by the Moluccas, China, and the Cape of Good Hope, maintaineth itself by circular motion, which is all one in Nature with motus ab oriente in occidentem.
Just now we steer due north, and yonder is the coast of Norway. From that coast parted Hugh Willoughby, three hundred years ago; the first of our countrymen who wrought an ice-bound highway to Cathay. Two years afterwards his ships were found, in the haven of Arzina, in Lapland, by some Russian fishermen; near and about them Willoughby and his companions seventy dead men.
This was my first trial of reindeer travel, and I was a little disappointed to find that it did not quite realise the expectations that had been excited in my boyish days by the pictures of galloping Lapland deer in the old geographies.
In Lapland there are doubtless individual deer better trained; the Lap herders tell of them with pride; but in the main this is a just description of reindeer handling. All the chief herders in Alaska are Laps, brought over for their knowledge of the animals, and the writer has repeatedly ridden behind some of their best deer. Wherein, then, lies the success of the reindeer experiment in Alaska?
In the morning Gerda told her all that the wood-pigeons had said; and the little robber-girl looked quite serious, and nodded her head, and said, "That is all talk, that is all talk. Do you know where Lapland is?" she asked the reindeer. "Who should know better than I do?" said the animal, while his eyes sparkled. "I was born and brought up there, and used to run about the snow-covered plains."
It is only within a very few years that the Norwegian Government has paid any attention to this far corner of the peninsula. On issuing from the strait, we turned southward into the great Porsanger Fjord, which stretches nearly a hundred miles into the heart of Lapland, dividing Western from Eastern Finmark.
The rigor of the climate did not check the development of the human race; in the most remote times Lapland, Nordland, the most northerly districts of Scandinavia, and even the bitterly cold Iceland, were peopled. The Exhibition of Paris, 1878, contained some stone weapons found on the shores of the White Sea.
Satisfied with the least of the little, he only felt one perpetual want that of completing his Flors. Not that LINNÆUS was insensible to his situation, for he gave his name to a little flower in Lapland the Linnæa Borealis, from the fanciful analogy he discovered between its character and his own early fate, "a little northern plant flowering early, depressed, abject, and long overlooked."
Amongst these may be mentioned the blue-throated warbler, ortolan bunting, Lapland bunting, shore lark, red-throated pipit, tree warbler, and many others.
The same doctors, Mercator in other of his globes and maps, Moletius in his sea-card, nevertheless doubting of so great continuance of the former continent, have opened a gulf betwixt the West Indies and the extreme northern land; but such a one that either is not to be travelled for the causes in the first objection alleged, or clean shut up from us in Europe by Greenland, the south end whereof Moletius maketh firm land with America, the north part continent with Lapland and Norway.
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