What was the original idea? To open a short way to the land of gold, to the East Indies. England, and other powers, jealous of Spain and Portugal, reckoned upon surprising them in the very heart of their distant possessions, in the very sanctuary of wealth. From the time of Queen Elizabeth of England, adventurers having found, or stated that they found, some portions of gold in Greenland, searched into, and made bold use of the old Northern legend of _treasure hidden beneath the Pole_; mountains of gold, guarded by Gnomes, &c., &c. And the legend inflamed men's minds. Upon so reasonable a notion, sixteen ships were sent out, having on board the sons and hopes of the noblest families. There was quite a competition as to who should have leave to go in quest of that Polar Eldorado; and those who sought it, succeeded in finding only hunger, icy barriers, suffering, and--Death! But that check was unavailing; during three hundred years, explorers, with a perfectly marvellous perseverance, continued to explore, to fail, to be martyrized, and to die. Cabot, the earliest of them, was only saved by the mutiny of his crew, who would not allow him to go any farther. Brentz died of cold, and Willoughby of famine. Cortereul lost all, property, and life; and Hudson was set adrift by his men, and, as he had neither sails nor provisions, it is but too probable that he perished miserably, though his fate was never precisely ascertained. Behring, in finding the strait which separates America from Asia, perished of fatigue, cold, and want, on a desert island. In our own day, Franklin perished, in the ice; he and his men having been reduced to the most horrible cannibalism. Every thing that can discourage man, is combined in these Northern voyages. Considerably before the Polar circle is reached, a cold fog freezes upon the sea, and covers you with hoar frost; sails and ropes are icy and stiffened, the deck is one sheet of glare ice, and every manoeuvre is a work of immense difficulty; and those moving shoals, the icebergs, that are so much to be dreaded, can scarcely be made out at the distance of the ship's length. At the mast-head, the look-out man, an actual living stalactite, every now and then warns the watch upon deck of the approach of a new enemy, a huge white phantom, a terrible iceberg, often from two to three hundred feet out of the water.