To ascertain what it meant application might perhaps be made to the directorate of the new company? Why not apply to its chairman? But the chairman was unknown! Unmentioned, too, were the secretary and directors. There was nothing to show from whom the advertisement emanated. It had been brought to the office of the _New York Herald_ by a certain William S. Forster, of Baltimore, a worthy agent for codfish, acting for Ardrinell and Co., of Newfoundland, and evidently a man of straw. He was as mute on the subject as the fish consigned to his care, and the cleverest of reporters and interviewers could get nothing out of him. But if the promoters of this industrial enterprise persisted in keeping their identity a mystery, their intentions were indicated clearly enough. They intended to acquire the freehold of that portion of the Arctic regions bounded by the eighty-fourth parallel of latitude, with the North Pole as the central point. Nothing was more certain than that among modern discoverers only Parry, Markham, Lockwood and Brainard had penetrated beyond this parallel. Other navigators of the Arctic seas had all halted below it. Payer, in 1874, had stopped at 82° 15′, to the north of Franz Joseph Land and Nova Zembla; De Long, in the _Jeannette_ expedition in 1879, had stopped at 78° 45′, in the neighbourhood of the islands which bear his name. Others, by way of New Siberia and Greenland, in the latitude of Cape Bismarck, had not advanced beyond the 76th, 77th, and 79th parallels; so that by leaving a space of twenty-five minutes between Lockwood and Brainard’s 83° 35′ and the 84° mentioned in the prospectus, the North Polar Practical Association would not encroach on prior discoveries. Its project affected an absolutely virgin soil, untrodden by human foot. The area of the portion of the globe within this eighty-fourth parallel is tolerably large. From 84° to 90° there are six degrees, which, at sixty miles each, give a radius of 360 miles and a diameter of 720 miles. The circumference is thus 2216 miles, and the area, in round numbers, 407,000 square miles. This is nearly a tenth of the whole of Europe—a good-sized estate!