remarkably well
protected against the depredation of the tooth of Time, not indeed
by lava and volcanic ashes, but by ice and snow. For when Carlsen on
the 9th September landed on the north-east coast of Novaya Zemlya in
76 deg. 7' N.L., he found there a house, 10 metres long and 6
metres wide, with the roof fallen in, long since abandoned and
filled with gravel and ice. From this frozen gravel were dug up a
large number of household articles, books, boxes, &c., which showed
that they were relics of Barents' winter dwelling, which now, almost
three hundred years after the place had been abandoned, came to the
light of day, so well preserved that they gave a lively idea of the
way in which the European passed his first winter in the true Polar
regions. When Carlsen had erected a cairn in which he placed a tin
canister containing an account of the discovery, he took on board
the most important of the articles which he had found and returned
to Norway. There he sold them at first for 10,800 crowns to an
Englishman, Mr. Ellis C. Lister Kay, who afterwards made them over
for the price he had paid for them to the Dutch Government. They are
now to be found arranged at the Marine Department at the Hague in a
model room, which is an exact reproduction of the interior of
Barents' house on Novaya Zemlya.[179]

After Carlsen, Barents' winter haven was visited in the year 1875 by
the Norwegian walrus-hunter, M. GUNDERSEN, who among other things
found there a broken chest containing two maps and a Dutch
translation of the narrative of Pet's and Jackman's voyages, and in
the year 1876 by Mr. CHARLES GARDINER, who through more systematic
excavations succeeded in collecting a considerable additional number
of remarkable things, among which were the ink-horn and the pens
which the Polar travellers had used nearly three centuries ago, and
a powder-horn, containing a short account, signed by Heemskerk and
Barents, of the most important incidents of the expedition.
Gundersen's _find_ is still, as far as I know, at Hammerfest;
Gardiner's has been handed over to the Dutch Government to be
preserved along with the other Barents relics at the Hague.

In 1872 the state of the ice both north of Spitzbergen and round
Novaya Zemlya was exceedingly unfavourable,[180] and several of the
scientific expeditions and hunting vessels, which that year visited
the Arctic Ocean, there underwent severe calamities and misfortunes.
Five of the best hunting