The Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61,
No. 380, June, 1847, by Various

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847

Author: Various

Release Date: August 29, 2008 [EBook #26484]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXXX. JUNE, 1847. Vol. LXI.

NORTH AMERICA, SIBERIA, AND RUSSIA.[A]

The circumnavigation of the world is now a matter of ordinary occurrence
to our bold mariners: and after a few years it will be a sort of summer
excursion to our steamers. We shall have the requisitions of the
Travellers' Club more stringent as the sphere of action grows wider; and
no man will be eligible who has not paid a visit to Pekin, or sunned
himself in Siam.

But a circuit of the globe on _terra firma_ is, we believe, new. Sir
George Simpson will have no competitor, that we have ever heard, to
claim from him the honour of having first galloped right a-head--from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Pacific to the British
Channel. One or two slight divergencies of some thousand miles down the
smooth and sunny bosom of the Pacific, are to be reckoned as mere
episodes: but Sir George soon recovers his course, plunges in through
the regions of the polar star; defies time, trouble, and Tartary;
marches in the track of tribes, of which all but the names have expired;
follows the glories of conquerors, whose bones have mingled five hundred
years ago with the dust of the desert; gives a flying glance on one side
towards the Wall of China, and on the other towards the Arctic Circle;
still presses on, till he reaches the confines of the frozen
civilisation of the Russian empire; and sweeps along, among bowing
governors and prostrate serfs,--still but emerging from barbarism--until
he does homage to the pomp of the