[Footnote 154: Witsen states, p. 43, that he had conversed with a Dutch seaman, Benedictus Klerk, who had formerly served on board a whaler, and afterwards been a prisoner in Corea. He had asserted that in whales that were killed on the coast of that country he had found Dutch harpoons. The Dutch then carried on whale-fishing only in the north part of the Atlantic. The _find_ thus shows that whales can swim from one ocean to the other. As we know that these colossal inhabitants of the Polar Sea do not swim from one ice-ocean to the other across the equator, this observation must be considered very important, especially at a time when the question whether Asia and America are connected across the Pole was yet unsettled. Witsen also enumerates, at p. 900, several occasions on which stone harpoons were found in the skins of whales caught in the North Atlantic. These harpoons, however, may as well be derived from the wild races, unacquainted with iron, at Davis\ Strait, as from tribes living on the north part of the Pacific. At Kamschatka, too, long before whale-fishing by Europeans began in Behring's Sea, harpoons marked with Latin letters were found in whales (Steller, _Beschreibung von dem Lande Kamtschatka_, Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1774, p. 102). ] [Footnote 155: The account of Wood's voyage was printed in London in 1694 by Smith and Walford, printers to the Royal Society (according to a statement by Barrington, _The possibility of approaching the North Pole asserted_, 2nd Edition, London, 1818, p. 34). I have only had an opportunity of seeing extracts from the account of this voyage in _Harris_ and others. ] [Footnote 156: Barrington published a number of papers on this question, which are collected in the work whose title is given above, of which there were two editions. ] [Footnote 157: At several places in his _Mittheilungen_, 1855-79. ]