ey discovered an island in latitude,
according to their observation, 74 deg. 30', which seemed about five
miles long. In this neighbourhood they remained four days, having on one
occasion a "great fight which lasted four glasses" with a polar bear, and
making a desperate attempt to capture him in order to bring him as a show
to Holland. The effort not being successful, they were obliged to take
his life to save their own; but in what manner they intended, had they
secured him alive, to provide for such a passenger in the long voyage
across the North Pole to China, and thence back to Amsterdam, did not
appear. The attempt illustrated the calmness, however, of those hardy
navigators. They left the island on the 13th June, having baptised it
Bear Island in memory of their vanquished foe, a name which was
subsequently exchanged for the insipid appellation of Cherry Island, in
honour of a comfortable London merchant who seven years afterwards sent a
ship to those arctic regions.

Six days later they saw land again, took the sun, and found their
latitude 80 deg. 11'. Certainly no men had ever been within less than ten
degrees of the pole before. On the longest day of the year they landed on
this newly discovered country, which they at first fancied to be a part
of Greenland. They found its surface covered with eternal snow, broken
into mighty glaciers, jagged with precipitous ice-peaks; and to this land
of almost perpetual winter, where the mercury freezes during ten months
in the year, and where the sun remains four months beneath the horizon,
they subsequently gave the appropriate and vernacular name of
Spitzbergen. Combats with the sole denizens of these hideous abodes, the
polar bears, on the floating ice, on the water, or on land, were
constantly occurring, and were the only events to disturb the monotony of
that perpetual icy sunshine, where no night came to relieve the almost
maddening glare. They rowed up a wide inlet on the western coast, and
came upon great numbers of wild-geese sitting on their eggs. They proved
to be the same geese that were in the habit of visiting Holland in vast
flocks every summer, and it had never before been discovered where they
laid and hatched their eggs. "Therefore," says the diarist of the
expedition, "some voyagers have not scrupled to state that the eggs grow
on trees in Scotland, and that such of the fruits of those trees as fall
into the water become goslings, while those which drop