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Updated: May 8, 2025
About the same period as when the party of Dutch sailors were left at Jan Mayen, a similar experiment was tried in Spitzbergen.
He had established a "farthest north" that has only been equaled by modern explorers, and his voyages near Spitzbergen had resulted in profitable fisheries. But Hudson was not yet satisfied, and indeed his recent voyage had impelled the English to equip him again for further explorations.
Gainvard's expedition quitted Hammerfest, the northernmost town in Scandinavia, and after a voyage of some weeks in duration, approached the gloomy coast of ice-bound Spitzbergen. The ice-fields and the icebergs inspired Madame d'Aunet with profound emotion, and, in describing them, she breaks out into what may be called a lyrical cry.
If it were not for that, those odious habits of steady industry and perseverance might never have been developed in ourselves at all, and we might be lazily picking copra off our own coco-palms, to this day, to export in return for the piece-goods of some Arctic Manchester situated somewhere about the north of Spitzbergen or the New Siberian Islands.
In this way in one day they are said to have skimmed the problems of Spitzbergen, Morocco, Dantzig, and the feeding of the enemy populations, leaving each problem where they had found it. The moment the discussion of a contentious question approached a climax, the specter of disagreement deterred them from pursuing it to a conclusion, and they passed on quickly to some other question.
The great preponderance of American material interests in the sub-arctic island of Spitzbergen, which has always been regarded politically as "no man's land," impels this Government to a continued and lively interest in the international dispositions to be made for the political governance and administration of that region.
Sequoias of many varieties ranged far into northern Canada. In northern Greenland there were luxuriant forests of magnolias, figs, and cycads; and a similar flora has been disinterred from the Cretaceous rocks of Alaska and Spitzbergen. Evidently the lands within the Arctic Circle enjoyed a warm and genial climate, as they had done during the Paleozoic.
Allison remarked that this was the only part of Baffin's Bay in which he had ever seen young whales; for it is a matter of surprise to the whalers in general, that they seldom or never meet with young ones on this fishery, as they are accustomed to do in the seas of Spitzbergen.
Before we leave the Northern Sea, we must not omit to mention the voyage by Spitzbergen northward, in 1818, of Captain Buchan in the Dorothea, accompanied by Lieutenant Franklin, in the Trent. It was Sir John Franklin's first voyage to the Arctic regions. This trip forms the subject of a delightful book by Captain Beechey.
The next day but I need not weary you with a journal of our daily proceedings, for, however interesting each moment of our stay in Spitzbergen was to ourselves as much perhaps from a vague expectation of what we might see, as from anything we actually did see a minute account of every walk we took, and every bone we picked up, or every human skeleton we came upon, would probably only make you wonder why on earth we should have wished to come so far to see so little.
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