Let us hope there may be land at the exact spot, for then the position can be checked at leisure, and there will be no doubt of its having been reached. Joseph Moxon, Hydrographer to the King, in 1652 met at Amsterdam a sailor of a Greenland ship which "went not out to fish that summer, but only to take in the lading of the whole fleet to bring it to an early market"—in other words, to act as a carrier—which ship, before the whaling fleet had caught enough to lade her, had by order of the Company sailed to the North Pole and back again, and even two degrees beyond it; no land seen, no ice, and the weather as it was in summer-time at Amsterdam. A sailor's yarn told in a tavern? Only this and nothing more, perhaps; though a good many things were kept dark in the whaling trade as in other trades. But if there had been an island at the Pole we might eventually have been able to verify that ancient mariner's tale. INDEX Abruzzi, Duke of, The, 76 Academy Land, 281 Actinia Haven, 87 _Advance_, The, 183, 236 _Aid_, The, 218, 219 Akaitcho, 150, 156, 160 Alaska, 134 Aldrich, Pelham, 255 _Alert_, H.M.S., 248, 278 _Alexander_, The, 179 Alexander, Cape, 234, 235 Alexandra Land, 75 _Alexandria_, H.M.S., 179 Alfred Ernest, Cape, 257 Ameralik Fiord, 261 America, The Norse discovery of, 3 Amundsen, Roald, 178, 214 _Ancylonema nordenskioeldii_, 264 Anderson Falls, The, 163 Andrée, S. A., 104 Anjou, P. F., 108 _Ann Frances_, The, 220 Antelope, 126 Archangel, 6 Archer, Colin, 91 Archer Fiord, 250, 257 Archer, R., 257 _Arctic_, The, 247 Arctic Search Expedition, The first, 7 _Assistance_, H.M.S., 183, 184 Atlassof, 128 Augustus the Eskimo, 157, 159, 160 Auk, Cape, 69 Auleitsivik Fiord, 263 Aurora Borealis, The, 67 Austin, Horatio, 183 Austria Sound, 68 Avigait, 264 Baal's River, 260 Back, George, 38, 149, 151, 156, 160, 203 Baden-Powell, Sir George, 105 Baffin, William, 15, 233 Baffin Land, 233 Banks Land, 172, 176, 182 Baranoff Cape, 85 Barents Bay, 49 Barents, Willem, 9, 49 Barnacle Goose, The, 12 Barren Grounds, The, 156, 159 Barrington, The Hon. Daines, 29 Barrow Point, 137, 167, 273 Barrow, Sir John, 178 Barrow Strait, 180 Bathurst Island, 180, 206 Bear, Black, 110 Bear Island, 12 Bear, Polar, 11, 12, 23, 27, 28, 52, 73, 74, 88, 99, 186, 238, 267 _Bear_, The, 278 Beaufort Sea, The, 173 Beaumont, Lewis Anthony, 257 Beechey, Cape, 159 Beechey, Frederick William, 35, 137 Beechey Island, 180, 183, 186, 206 Belanger, 151 Belcher, Edward, 184 Bellot, Joseph René, 183, 207 Bellot Strait, 197 Bennet, Stephen, 12 Bennett Island, 107, 117, 126 Bering Strait, 85, 127 Bering, Veit, 130 Berry, Captain, 141 Bessels, Emil, 245 Best, George, 220 Best's Bulwark, 219 Bille, Cape, 262 Bird Cape, 12 Birds, 12, 88, 113, 114, 141, 160, 172, 181, 228, 239, 258, 280 Bismarck, Cape, 268