Now turn to the map in this book, and see just where we are. Like most Americans, I had always thought of Newfoundland as a sub-arctic country far to the north of us. Since leaving New York I have felt like an explorer on his way to the Pole. The fact is, however, that we have been steaming much more to the east than to the north, and are at this moment only about sixteen hundred miles from the west coast of Ireland. We have come hardly three hundred miles north of New York, but so far to the eastward that we are half way to Liverpool. We are still south of England, in the same latitude as Paris, and are not far from the shoals that form the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, famous the world over as cod-fishing grounds. Here the bed of the ocean rises to within less than five hundred feet of the surface, and the cold arctic currents meet the Gulf Stream, causing the fogs so much dreaded in this part of the Atlantic. As seen on the map, Newfoundland is a triangle of land that nearly fills, like a plug, the gaping mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but it also commands the sea routes of the North Atlantic, and its possession by an enemy power would menace both Canada and the United States. It has an area of forty-two thousand square miles, being larger than Ireland and of about the same size as Tennessee. At first glance it seems a part of the mainland, but a closer look shows the Strait of Belle Isle separating the island from the Labrador coast. Though in some places only eight or ten miles wide, this strait furnishes a summer-time passage for transatlantic liners to Canada. For some years there has been talk of building a dam across the Strait of Belle Isle, to stop the icy waters of the Labrador current coming through the Strait into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This, it is claimed, would force the Gulf Stream closer to Newfoundland, and give that country and eastern Quebec a climate as warm as that of New Jersey. How England would fare in this shifting of ocean waters no one can say; the history of the world would have been vastly different but for the present course of the Gulf Stream in relation to the British Isles. However, no one has yet offered to pay for this project, and shipping men say it would be impossible to make a dam strong enough to withstand the enormous pressure of ice, which comes down from the arctic every year in great floes of from five hundred to one thousand square miles and sometimes piles up on shore to the height of a five-story building.