TERENCE LARKINS, First Officer of the Billowcrest, with a disregard of facts. MR. EMORY, Second Officer of the Billowcrest. WILLIAM STURRITT, Steward of the Billowcrest, and inventor of condensed food tablets. FRENCHY, a bosun who stirs up trouble. PRINCE OF THE PURPLE FIELDS, a gentle despot of the _Port of Dreams_. PRINCESS OF THE LILIED HILLS, _His Serene Sister_, whose domain is the deepest South. Three maidens of the _Land of Dreams and Lotus_. A shipwrecked sailor, whose rescue is important to all concerned. Cabin boy, stewardess, and crew of the Billowcrest. Courtiers, populace, etc., of the _Land of the Sloping Sun_. THE GREAT WHITE WAY. I. ANSWER TO AN OLD SUMMONS. For more than ten generations my maternal ancestors have been farers of the sea, and I was born within call of high tide. At the distance of a thousand miles inland it still called me, and often in childhood I woke at night from dreams of a blue harbor with white sails. It is not strange, therefore, that I should return to the coast. When, at the age of thirty, I found myself happily rid of a commercial venture—conducted for ten years half-heartedly and with insignificant results—it was only natural that I should set my face seaward. My custom, of which there was never any great amount, and my goodwill, of which there was ever an abundance, I had disposed of to one who was likely to reverse these conditions—his methods in the matter of trade being rather less eccentric than my own. He had been able to pay me in cash the modest sum agreed upon, and this amount I now hoped to increase through some marine investment or adventure—something that would bring me at once into active sea life—though I do not now see what this could have been, and I confess that my ideas at the time were somewhat vague. II. I RENEW AN OLD DREAM. Perhaps first of all I wished to visit the South Pole—not an unreasonable ambition it would seem for one backed by ten generations of sea captains and ocean faring—but one that I found not altogether easy to gratify. For one thing, there was no Antarctic expedition forming at the time; and then, my notions in the matter were not popular. From boyhood it had been my dream that about the earth’s southern axis, shut in by a precipitous wall of ice, there lay a great undiscovered world. Not a bleak desolation of storm-swept peaks and glaciers, but a fair, fruitful land, warmed and nourished from beneath by the great central heat brought nearer to the surface there through terrestrial oblation, or, as my geography had put it, the “flattening of the poles.”