Spitzbergen, and the expeditions of Phipps and Admiral Wrangell, Captains Buchan and Franklin, Parry, Kane, and Hayes, none of whom have accomplished the grand end of Arctic explorations, and whose successes, hard-earned and inconsiderable as they have been, have been gained only after spending years of time, millions of money, and toiling on foot or in the sledge over hundreds of miles of rugged ice.

Throughout his Address, Captain Bent has modestly confined himself to a naked statement of facts, leaving us to divine their significance and import. But, a single glance at the historical items here given, will suffice to satisfy the mind that this Polar question is fast emerging from the field of speculation, and, however slow its progress has been, or, however, through human prejudice, its settlement may be retarded, that it is steadily drifting like the long-dislodged iceberg, into the regions of sunlight.

At short intervals, through a period of three centuries, countless efforts have been made to this end.

Enterprises

have been tried under the most propitious auspices. Most of these have been guided by the ablest minds, and the most expert seamen of the world, upheld by the most lavish outlays of moral sympathy and material wealth, and animated by a zeal which the eternal ices of the North could not chill. In vain have they endeavored every route, save the one now suggested. Their failures and disasters have been most signal. The paltry successes they have reaped -paltry when compared with the means employed-have been reaped only by crossing immense plateaus and mountains of ice, with infinitely more pains and perils than attended Hannibal's or Napoleon's passage of the Alps. And this fact alone, however it may shed lustre and glory on the heroic explorers, reflects none or but little light on the Arctic problem, unless, like the floating fragments of some noble craft that has foundered and gone down, to tell a tale of warning, and to reveal the rocks on which the fairest hopes lie stranded.

And yet in the very gropings of these gallant spirits-such as Kellett and Kotzebue and Parry and Kane-it appears that just so far as, accidentally, they were led to move towards these "Thermometric Gateways to the Pole," now pointed out, light has beamed upon their pathway. The moment they were called away from these routes and looked westwardly, that light grew dimmer, till it was quenched; and some of them steering away from waters almost tepid and halcyon, promising a furrow for their keels, quickly plunged into cold, and became entangled in icy desolation.

These data, the purchase of so much life, when rightly read, although they yield but meagre positive information, are of vital importance.

Negatively they tell the future mariner to give a wide berth to, and to stand far away from these ice-guarded and impracticable avenues to the Pole, if avenues they can be called.

Their testimony, sad and silent as it is, seems to shut us up to the conclusion of the profound reasoning of the Address before us. Certainly, with so much in its favor, and in the absence of all rebutting evidence, the positive facts, adduced by Captain Bent from the Archives of the Royal Society of London, that “in 1655, a Dutch whaler sailed in a perfectly free and open sea to within one degree of the Pole," and that, "about the same period another had gone two degrees beyond the Pole," and this, as he remarks, "by following accidentally the very pathways science now points out as affording the only gateways to the Pole," cannot be neglected nor easily rejected by thinking men. For, it is a well known historical fact that, about the middle of the seventeenth century, the marine glory of the Dutch rose to its highest degree of brilliance. Then, too, it was, as we are told by the greatest geographical authority of the world,* that the Dutch whale-fisheries were in the flood tide of success "between Bear and Cherry Island and Novaia Zemlia, and towards Spitzbergen, whence the rapacity of the fishermen, to use the whaler's

Keith Johnston's Physical Atlas, p. 90.

We now conclude our statement of the salient points of this remarkable hypothesis, if such a term can be applied to it, in the closing words of its author: "I repeat my belief, that the North Pole has already been reached— that it was done in the seventeenth cen

tury, by the Dutch whalers before spoken of, and that they reached there by having unconsciously followed the path of the Gulf Stream. And I therefore reiterate the convictions expressed in my communications to the President of the Geographical Society of New York: "That the Gulf Stream and KuroSiwo are the prime and only cause of the open sea about the Pole, with its temperature so much above that due to the latitude; that the only practicable avenues by which ships can reach that open sea, and thence to the Pole, is by following the warm waters of these streams into that sea; and that to find and follow these streams, the water-thermometer is the only guide, and that for this reason they may be justly termed 'THE THERMOMETRIC

GATEWAYS TO THE POLE.

The theory of a "Thermometric Gateway to the Pole" is now fairly before us. Able as is the argument of its author, necessarily limited in its range, its presents but one ground for its support, the thermic influence of the ocean's surface-currents, in determining climatic conditions. We do not think Captain Bent lays too much stress upon this. The most enduring structures sometimes repose, like the Eddystone lighthouse, upon a single rock. A passage in one of Sir David Brewster's works, shows that his fertile and logical mind once began to evolve this very hypothesis, but was arrested by want of the exact data. Pouillet dropped hints of it in his magnificent discussions of the laws of heat. And the lamented Kane, in 1856, while composing his Narrative, hearing Captain Bent's views from his own lips, in New York, was so impress

"On ne peut guère douter que des courants ne contribuent puissament a produire la distribution de la chaleur."

his MSS. (vol. i., p. 309), "I would respectfully suggest to those, whose opportunities facilitate the inquiry, whether it may not be, that the Gulf Stream, traced already to the coast of Novaia Zemlia, is deflected by that peninsula into the space around the Pole. would require a change in the mean summer-temperature of only a few degrees to develop the periodical recurrence of open

water."

It

But, however sure and steadfast may be the foundation on which this belief rests, the question will be raised, has Nature any other processes and phenomena which affect it? And, if so, do these cooperate with, or do they counterwork the agency of the Gulf Stream and Kuro-Siwo?

Certainly, we dare not and cannot think Captain Bent would have us treat as settled, a problem, which, as he says, has cost "thousands of lives, millions upon millions of money, and three hundred years of time," till we have sifted and proved the solution by the most searching and unsparing tests.

To a few of the severest trials we shall now strive to subject it.

(1.) If it be true, as this Thermometric theory claims, that the Gulf Stream reaches the Pole with heat enough to melt its ices, it ought to follow, conversely, that the cold, counter undercurrent from the Arctic Ocean, that offsets the Gulf Stream, will, in its long flow to the South, lose but little of its Arctic cold, and reach the tropics with frigorific power. Such, at least, would be the demand of a remorseless logic. Anxiously, we turn to ask, “Is this demand satisfied? Do the nicest, mean observations attest the fact indubitably?" Here is a gigantic balance, hung by the Creator himself, one scale at the pole, the other at the tropic. The first is, as yet, invisible; the other we can read. We know that they must be in equilibrio. Let us go to the tropic, and, with the deep-sea thermometer, “drag

The reader must bear in mind that sea-water freezes at 28° Fahrenheit.

up" an answer from this unbiassed and incorruptible witness.

We have the most exact observations, taken with a variety of exquisitely constructed instruments, and continued, at vast expense of money and care, through many years. They all tell the same story, so that science may be said to have sat at the feet of this great aqueous traveller to the Pole, and heard him recount its mysteries.

Professor Bache, of the United States Coast Survey, records that "at the very bottom of the Gulf Stream, when its waters, at the surface, were 80° in temperature, the instruments of the Coast Survey recorded a temperature as lon as 35° Fahrenheit!" The cushion of water under this must have been even colder; and this cushion is the counter undercurrent whose testimony we are secking. Other authorities give the temperature of this Arctic current, after it has flowed all the way to the northern shores of South America, at 42°! The author of "The Physical Geography of the Sea" tells us: "Within the Arctic circle, the temperature, at corresponding depths off the shores of Spitzbergen, is said to be only one degree colder than in the Caribbean Sea." (P. 31.) Let the reader judge how the theory stands this test.

(2.) These facts are powerfully corroborated by some significant items furnished by Dr. Kane. When he had gone as far, on land, to the North as possible, he came to a vast barrier of ice, stretching polewards, he knew not how far. Nothing daunted, by means of sledges, he and his party plunged into this frozen mass, and, after travelling one hundred miles, they descried the celebrated "Open Sea," which has ever since borne their leader's name. Before gaining the shores of this illimitable expanse of water, the thermometers stood-60°, sixty degrees below zero. (This is 88° below the freezing point of sea-water.) But, on coming up to the open water, and casting the same instruments into it, the mercury in the tubes instantly rose 96°, and showed 36° above zero!

"Seals were sporting and waterfowl

Its waves

feeding in this open sea. came rolling in, and dashing with measured tread, like the majestic billows of old ocean, against the shore. Solitude, the cold and boundless expanse, and the mysterious heavings of its green waters, lent their charm to the scene."

The temperature of its waters was only 36°! Whence could these waters have come? Was this a vast lake, with no outlet ?

There is no room for surprise when we are told, that the Gulf Stream enters the space around the Pole at a temperature above the freezing point (28°), when we find warmer water (at 36°) almost at the Pole, and outside the heat-bearing current.

The Arctic current that offsets the Gulf Stream and flows south, reaching it at 35° temperature, could not have left the Pole colder than 28°; for then it would have been frozen up. In its transit to the South it only loses 6° or 7° of its temperature. Is it then a thing incredible, that the Gulf Stream, this mighty "river in the ocean," whose caloric, "if utilized, could keep in blast a cyclopean furnace, capable of sending forth a stream of molten iron as large as the volume discharged by the Mississippi river," is it incredible that this current may reach the Polar region at 36° ? Remember it begins its race off Florida at 86°. It might then lose 50° of its heat (against the loss of 6° or 7° of its counter-current), flow on to the Pole, melt its ices, and yet have 8° of heat to spare, before it would fall to 28', the ice-point. The estimate of its rate of thermal reduction, as given by the United States Hydrographical Bureau, is, that as far as traced, "it loses 2° of heat, in running over ten degrees of latitude," i. e., it suffers a loss of 1° in every three hundred miles. A simple calculation shows that it ought to reach the Pole at this rate, certainly not below 48° or 50°.*

The results of Dr. Kane's Expedition may be regarded as the greatest approximation to the knowledge of the Pole the world has. And in bringing

More probably 60°.

this theory to the light shed by this gallant explorer, on the facts at issue, we have subjected it to the most unsparing ordeal suggested by the annals of history.

(3.) We may apply a third method of tension to this hypothesis. Does it conform in its requirements to "the law of currents," now so well established, and which ordains that "every current in the sea has its counter-current, and wherever one current is found, carrying of water from this or that part of the sea, to the same part must some other current convey an equal volume of water, or else the first would, in the course of time, cease for the want of water to supply it?"

This theory before us claims that the Gulf Stream, whose dimensions we know, pours a part of its volume into the space around the Pole. If so, out of the same space must there flow" equal volume," towards the Equator. Is this found to be the fact?

an

It is true, marine researches have not furnished information sufficient to speak here with mathematical precision. But we have facts and light abundant, severely to scrutinize the premises, and to detect any error in the principle upon which Captain Bent's conclusion rests.

There certainly issues from the space around the Pole a ceaseless and mighty flow of waters to the tropics. In its course icebergs of huge proportions are carried off from the mainland. So vast are these icy masses, and often so numerous in floating clusters as to defy computation. Captain Beechy saw a small one fall from a glacier in Spitzbergen, over four hundred thousand tons in weight. The Great Western, in 1841, in her transatlantic trip, met three hundred icebergs. Sir John Ross saw several aground, in Baffin's Bay, in water two hundred and sixty fathoms deep; one he computed to weigh 1,259,397,673 tons. A Danish voyager saw one of 900,000,000 cubic feet. Sir J. C. Ross met with some of these floating mountains twice as large as this. And in Davis' Straits, where there is deep water, "icebergs have been met having

an area of six square miles and six hundred feet high.*

The hyperborean current, which bears these monsters on its bosom, has formed by the deposit from their dissolution, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, which, were the waters of the Atlantic dried up, would probably be seen to rise from the sea-bottom in the majestic proportions of Mt. Brown and Mont Blanc.

The single drift of ice, which bore on its Atlean shoulders the English ship

Resolute,” abandoned by Captain Kellett, and cast it twelve hundred miles to the south, was computed to be at least three hundred thousand square miles in area and seven feet in thickness. Such a field of ice would weigh over 18,000,000,000 tons. We say this was a single drift through Davis' Straits, only one of the avenues of this current from the Pole, and only a fractional part of the drift in the year.

What a mighty flow of water, from the south, must that be which, wedging itself into the space around the Pole, ejects such masses out of this space as quietly and easily as the steam-driven piston of the fire-engine throws out its jet d'eau !

We dwell upon the might and magnitude of this ice-bearing river from the Pole, because in gauging these we gauge the energy of the reciprocal, heat-bearing "river," from the tropics, i. e., the Gulf Stream.

The theory of Columbus for finding a way to the East, had far less to support it, it seems to us, than this theory of a way to the Pole.

(4.) But, as it appears to our mind, the most interesting aspect of this question is its Meteorology. It was chiefly with the aim of touching upon this branch of the subject we took up the pen. The atmosphere, invisible as it is, is the mightiest engine on our globe. In the terrestrial economy it may, not unfitly, be likened to the Behemoth, described in the book of Job, "that drink

*Their depth must therefore have been 4,800 feet, i. e., eight times the height.