If Only My Hull Skipper Were As Good A Draughtsman
As He Seemed To Be A Seaman, We Should Now Be On Our Way
To One Of The Wonders Of The World.
Most people here hold
out rather a doleful prospect, and say that, in the first
place, it is probable
The whole island will be imprisoned
within the eternal fields of ice, that lie out for upwards
of a hundred and fifty miles along the eastern coast of
Greenland; and next, that if even the sea should be clear
in its vicinity, the fogs up there are so dense and
constant that the chances are very much against our
hitting the land. But the fact of the last French
man-of-war which sailed in that direction never having
returned, has made those seas needlessly unpopular at
Reykjavik.
It was during one of these fogs that Captain Fotherby,
the original discoverer of Jan Mayen, stumbled upon it
in 1614. While sailing southwards in a mist too thick to
see a ship's length off, he. suddenly heard the noise of
waters breaking on a great shore; and when the gigantic
bases of Mount Beerenberg gradually disclosed themselves,
he thought he had discovered some new continent. Since
then it has been often sighted by homeward-bound whalers,
but rarely landed upon. About the year 1633 the Dutch
Government, wishing to establish a settlement in the
actual neighbourhood of the fishing-grounds, where the
blubber might be boiled down, and the spoils of each
season transported home in the smallest bulk, - actually
induced seven seamen to volunteer remaining the whole
winter on the island.
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