Thirty-five years ago I made a voyage to the Arctic Seas in what
Chaucer calls
A little bote
No bigger than a manne's thought;
it was a Phantom Ship that made some voyages to different parts of
the world which were recorded in early numbers of Charles Dickens's
"Household Words." As preface to Richard Hakluyt's records of the
first endeavour of our bold Elizabethan mariners to find North-West
Passage to the East, let me repeat here that old voyage of mine from
No. 55 of "Household Words," dated the 12th of April, 1851: The
Phantom is fitted out for Arctic exploration, with instructions to
find her way, by the north-west, to Behring Straits, and take the
South Pole on her passage home. 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. The ships were freighted with their
frozen crews, and sailed for England; but, "being unstaunch, as it
is supposed, by their two years' wintering in Lapland, sunk, by the
way, with their dead, and them also that brought them."
Ice floats about us now, and here is a whale blowing; a whale, too,
very near Spitzbergen.
Enter page number
Next
Page 1 of 178
Words from 1 to 264
of 50368
