le. The duty that I owe to truth compels me to
acknowledge that I have not been solicited to write this narrative by my
friends; nor has it been the pastime of my leisure hours; nor written to
amuse an invalid; nor, in fact, for any of those reasons which have
prompted so many men and women to write a book. It is, on the contrary,
the result of hours of laborious work, undertaken for the sole purpose
of benefiting Science and giving encouragement to those progressive
minds who have already added their mite of knowledge to the coming
future of the race. "We owe a duty to posterity," says Junius in his
famous letter to the king. A declaration that ought to be a motto for
every schoolroom, and graven above every legislative hall in the world.
It should be taught to the child as soon as reason has begun to dawn,
and be its guide until age has become its master.

It is my desire not to make this story a personal matter; and for that
unavoidable prominence which is given one's own identity in relating
personal experiences, an indulgence is craved from whomsoever may peruse
these pages.

In order to explain how and why I came to venture upon a journey no
other of my sex has ever attempted, I am compelled to make a slight
mention of my family and nationality.

I am a Russian: born to a family of nobility, wealth, and political
power. Had the natural expectations for my birth and condition been
fulfilled, I should have lived, loved, married and died a Russian
aristocrat, and been unknown to the next generation--and this narrative
would not have been written.

There are some people who seem to have been born for the sole purpose of
becoming the playthings of Fate--who are tossed from one condition of
life to another without wish or will of their own. Of this class I am an
illustration. Had I started out with a resolve to discover the North
Pole, I should never have succeeded. But all my hopes, affections,
thoughts, and desires were centered in another direction, hence--but my
narrative will explain the rest.

The tongue of woman has long been celebrated as an unruly member, and
perhaps, in some of the domestic affairs of life, it has been
unnecessarily active; yet no one who gives this narrative a perusal, can
justly deny that it was the primal cause of the grandest discovery of
the age.

I was educated in Paris, where my vacations were frequently spent with
an American family who resided there, and with whom my father had