of the Polar lands, &c.[155]

When Wood failed, he abandoned the views he had before maintained,
declaring that the statements on which he had founded his plans were
downright lies and delusions. But the belief in a polar sea that is
occasionally navigable is not yet given up. It has since then been
maintained by such men as DAINES BARRINGTON,[156] FERDINAND VON
WRANGEL, AUGUSTUS PETERMANN,[157] and others. Along with nearly all
Polar travellers of the present day, I had long been of an opposite
opinion, believing the Polar Sea to be constantly covered with
impenetrable masses of ice, continuous or broken up, but I have come
to entertain other views since in the course of two winterings--the
first in 79 deg.53', that is to say, nearer the Pole than any
other has wintered in the old world, the second in the neighbourhood
of the Asiatic Pole of cold--I have seen that the sea does not
freeze completely, even in the immediate neighbourhood of land. From
this I draw the conclusion that the sea scarcely anywhere
permanently[158] freezes over where it is of any considerable depth,
and far from land. If this be the case, there is nothing
unreasonable in the old accounts, and what has happened once we may
expect to happen another time.

However this may be, it is certain that the ignominious result of
Wood's voyage exerted so great a deterring influence from all new
undertakings in the same direction, that nearly two hundred years
elapsed before an expedition was again sent out with the distinctly
declared intention, which was afterwards disavowed, of achieving a
north-east passage. This was the famous Austrian expedition of PAYER
and WEYPRECHT in 1872-74, which failed indeed in penetrating far to
the eastward, but which in any case formed an epoch in the history
of Arctic exploration by the discovery of Franz-Josef's Land and by
many valuable researches on the natural conditions of the Polar
lands. Considered as a North-east voyage, this expedition was the
immediate predecessor of that of the _Vega_.

It is so well known through numerous works recently published, and
above all by Payer's spirited narrative, that I need not go into
further detail regarding it.

But if the North-east voyages proper thus almost entirely ceased
during the long interval between Wood's and Payer's voyages, a large
number of other journeys for the purpose of research and hunting
were instead carried out during this period, through which we
obta