our
days the accounts of new sources of wealth do not spread so speedily
as in this case, unless, along with the history of the discovery
which was written by Hakluyt, Purchas, De Veer, &c., there had been
an unknown history of discovery and the whale-fishing, of which it
may still be possible to collect some particulars from the archives
of San Sebastian, Dunkirk, Hull, and other ports.

However this may be, it is certain that the English and Dutch
North-east voyages gave origin to a whale-fishery in the sea round
Spitzbergen, which increased by many millions the national wealth of
these rich commercial states. The fishing went on at first
immediately along the coasts, from which, however, the whales
were soon driven, so that the whale-fishers had to seek new
fishing-grounds, first farther out to sea between Spitzbergen and
Greenland, then in Davis' Strait, and finally in the South Polar
Sea, or in the sea on both sides of Behring's Straits.

Spitzbergen, when the whale-fishing ceased in its neighbourhood, was
mostly abandoned, until the Russians began to settle there,
principally for the hunting of the mountain fox and the reindeer. Of
their hunting voyages we know very little, but that they had been
widely prosecuted is shown by the remains of their dwellings or huts
on nearly all the fjords of Spitzbergen.

[Illustration: NORWEGIAN HUNTING SLOOP. The _Proeven_,
employed by the Swedish Expedition to the Yenisej in 1875. ]

They seem to have often wintered, probably because the defective
build of their vessels only permitted them to sail to and from
Spitzbergen during the height of summer, and they could not thus
take part without wintering in the autumn hunting, during which the
fattest reindeer are got; nor could the thick and valuable fur of
the winter-fox be obtained without wintering.[171] But the hunting
voyages of the Russians to Spitzbergen have also long ceased. The
last voyage thither took place in 1851-52, and had a very
unfortunate issue for most of those who took part in it, twelve men
dying out of twenty. On the other hand, the Norwegian voyages to
Spitzbergen for the seal and walrus-hunting, begun in the end of
last century, still go on. Their history, too, is, even here in the
North, very incompletely known, at least to 1858, when the Swedish
scientific expeditions began regularly to visit those regions, and
to include in the narratives of their voyages more or less complete
accounts of the Norw