The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-12-30 00:00:00

AN OPEN POLAR SEA.

On the subject as to whether there is an Open Polar Sea or
not, The Times publishes the following letter :
Sir,—With refarence to the recent letter of a clistin
guished German geographer to the Royal Geographical
Society on the subject of Arctic Expeditions, I really
cannot help expressing my amazement that any one
should still be found to maintain the existence of an
open ocean round the Pole. As I have passed five
seasons in tie Polar Seas, my opinion may, perhaps,
be considered worth hearing on the point.

After my first two voyages, in 1858 and 1859, I
formed a very strong opinion—and published that
opinion (" Seasons with Sea-horses," 1861)—to the
effect that no open Polar ocean did or could exist.
Years after that I was partially argued out of my own
practically-formed opinion by one or two learned
sten who had theoretically formed a different
opinion; and I fitted out, entirely at my own
expense, a costly and very well-adapted yes. I
sel, with which I passed three more seasons
amid the Polar ice, in hopes that by combining my
practical knowledge with the theories of my learned
friends I might make at least some approach towards
the Pole. The result was that I returned with my own
previous convictions strongly fortified—viz., that no
approach Can possibly be made to the Pole by water.
In the course of my voyages I have talked long and
earnestly with scores of intelligent practical men who
have pawed their lives in ransacking the Polar Ocean,
and who would run any risks to get acmes to fresh
hunting grounds to the north, and I never met one of
these men who had not an utter and contemptuous dis-
belief in the existence of an open ocean to the north.
Now, after all that, is it not enough to take one's
breath away with astonishment to be told by a learned
philosopher who has never, so to speak, left his own
library, "that we ought to have had no difflculty
whatever in sailing straight away to the Pole ?" and
that through pack-ice SO densej and heavy that the
strongest ironclad afloat could not force her own length
Into it.
Every now and then it makes me laugh to hear or to
read of some one who says that some one else had got
to the edge of this open Polar ocean and saw nothing
before him but open water —"a vast, illimitable, open
ocean reaching to the Pole " is, I think, the usual ex-
pression i and that nothing but want of time, or want
of provisions, or want of something else had prevented
him—the informant's informant—frim Bailing to
the pole direct. Now surely it u time that
all this nonsense about an open Polar sea was
knocked on the head. I have been deceived twenty
times myself by what looked like an open sea when
in reality it was only a pond of water a few miles broad.
We are all liable to be deluded in like manner, be-
cause, in our eagerness to see what we wish to see we
are apt to lose sight of three very simple facts
that ice lies very low in the water; secondly, that it is
only a very small horizon that one sees from the mast-
head of a vessel; and, thirdly, that only half a mile
beyond our horizon may lie, not "a vast, illimitable
ocean," but a vast illimitable ice-field reaching to the
Pole.
To conclude, I beg to express my firm belief, founded
on all I have seen, on all I have heard, and on all I
have read, that all around the North Pole, as around
the South Pole, there lies an eternal mass of ice, a
thousand miles in diameter and perhaps miles thick in
the centre. And, further, Ido not believe that either
ship, sledge, man, beast, bird, or balloon will ever get
across it.—l am, Sir, your obedient servant,
JAMES Lanoir, F. G, S. , F.R.G, S.