Memphis daily appeal. [volume] (Memphis, Tenn.) 1847-1886, 1868-09-13
NAVAL HEROES.
Adventures OfIlIustrious Sailors.


The daring and adventurous spirit OF
our race has been well exemplihed IN
every age by u seamen. Again n
again have they penetrated the awful
lev solitudes of the Arctic regions
realms where no living creature is to be
seen. save rare tenants of the deep. Ice
everywhere, and no life. Calm, profound,
oppressive, awful Summer has gone,
with its never-setting sun-the red orb
rolling forsix months in ceaseiess course,
like a slow-moving red-hot c~annon-ball,
round the horizon illuminating the wide
wastes of ice and snow which sparkle
with colors not their own, beneath the
sun-rays which they analyze. Winter has
come with its perpetual twilight. Never
a sunrise to mark the return of day only
a little less darkness. And the cold, in
tense. frightful, piercing through the
tbickest fr-skins which nature creates,
and the warmestf annels which Rochdale
can manufacture. The ship is frozen in,
and covered up, as if its tenants had con-
yerted il into a tent. Again the summer;
again a broad CLEAN of ice-besprinkled
waters again some miles of movement,
onward or backward again expeditions
over the ice on sledges again the ever
| rolling u n;-and once more Winter. so
have a dozen and more of English ships
penetrated into that lifeless handsome
to return, but others to be crushed be-
tween the closing masses of ice-others
abandoned in the solid unopened ice
fields. which even the six months sun
could not melt the crews seeking to
make their way back, and some of them
perishing like brave FRANKLIN and his
men, ere they could reach the settlements
OF the Esquimauz, or Of the rowing In
dian tribes of the mainland.
And now SHERARD OSBORN, that gal
liant sailor, is dying himself, and is
stirring up others, for a new and still
grander enterprise in those barren Polar
regions. Hitherto, the main object of
all our searches in the Arctic regions has
been to find a northwest passage-t ascer-
tain if any sea-route extended from
Baffn's Bay to Behring's Strait. And
we have found it at last; but only to
know that it can never be sailed by ship
that it is never sufficiently open to al
! low a vessel, with all the help of steam,
to make its way around the northern
/ coast of the American continent from the
| Atlantic to the Pacific. 1t was a boot
less search, no doubt, for any purpose
save that of solving a geographical mys-
terry. 1t was a search handed down to
us from the long by-gone time when we
sought a western route to the golden
realms of Ind through regions not ap-
propriated by the Catholic Majesties of
Spain and Portugal, whose subjects were
then the grand discoveries of the world.
N~ow-a-davs all that has passed. Dis
~coverers no longer go forth to find and
claim new empires for their sovereigns
but with the pure and simple object Of
unwilling the face of the earth, and OF
finding answers in the region of the un-
inhabitable to questions of science which
are unanswerable in the portions OF the
globe habitable by a 1t is Science,
not Conquest, which inspires discovery
and profits by its triumphs. And. so,
leaving the Northwest passage as the
property of the dead FRANKLIN, and of
those who vainly went to his rescue,
SHERARD OSBORN longs to sail for the
Pole itself-to stand upon the deck, with
the keel of his ship right above the Pole
the most mysterious, as we'll as unap-
proachable point of the globe the mag
netic wonder the point furthest from
the Equator the North-where the
bright auroras have their birth-whence
they spring as from q magnetic fountain,
and rising high into the zenith, are seen
from afar in pickering streams by us
jewellers in the temperate zone. Such Is
the goal of SHRRARD OsBORNs ambition.
He will not rest until he has planted his
foot upon the mysterious Polar spot,
where the restless magnetic needle at
length ceases to move, and brought back
with him an answer to the queries with
which our scientific bodies will intrust
him. Is it land or sea that covers the
apex of our globe? And how do the
northern lights look when viewed by one
who stands beneath them, on the spot
from whence they rise? Do they spring
direct from earth, or are they generated,
developed only in the upper SKYE And
how grand to see the sun never setting T!
To see it roll round and round the Pole
sight never witnessed by mortal man
sight the strangest which man can
witness, and which will make immortal
the name of the hardy explorer who first
beholds it.
SHERARDO OSBORN longs to sail thither,
Well, it is about the only mysterious
spot on earth in the search for which
this wild, noble spirit of adventure can
now exercise itself. Human nature will
have its aspirations after the unknown
heroic life will risk or sacrifice itself in
the romance of discovery, whether its
obiectb be a new world, or an Utopia. Co
LUMBUs sailed in search OF the tabled
Atlantis amid the seas of the West and
after he made his grand discovery, in all
his subsequent voyages he dreamt that
Paradise. the long-lost Eden, still lay in
its beauty somewhere on the uplands of
the new world which he had found.
VAsco DI CANA aspired to unyeil the
shape and round the southern extremity
of the African Continent, successfully
Drawing the stormy Spirit of the Cape.
The daring MAGELLAN did the same for
Southern America and passing through
the rock portals of the strait which now
bears his nalne he and his three ships
entered the vide, unrufled, solitary ex-
panse of the Pacific.
"They were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea-"
sailing for three months and a half over
it's calm depths without ever sighting
land and at length %perishing, in the
hour of their completed triumph, by the
hands of savages, a victim to their too
reckless daring. Thrice did u own
Cook circumnavigate the globe, diseov-
ering the isles innumerable of the Pacihc,
to perish at last like MAGELLAN on. the
sea-beach Of one of the Sandwich Islands.
And what of the gallant Raleigh, and
the other searchers after Eldorado-the
golden region which was believed to lie
in the interior of the New World, some
where between the rivers 0rinoco and
Amazons-with its rock so impregnated
with the precious ore, that they shone In
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