Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

The doctor administered these nuts to girls afflicted with curvature of the spine in a 'school for servants,' and with the happiest effects; and has treated a sufficient number of cases satisfactorily by this alimentary method, to justify the conclusion, that the vital principle, duly supplied with the proper materials, is able to cure all cases of laterad, sternad, and dorsad curvature in growing children-not arising from caries of the vertebræ-without mechanical appliances; and that those appliances are a hinderance rather than a help, by diminishing muscular exertion, and, as a consequence, weakening muscular power.'

The doctor brings forward the case of a young lady of sixteen, who, after three months' treatment, had almost lost her spinal deviations,' and pursues: 'I am extremely desirous of directing the attention of orthopaedic surgeons to this mode of treatment, because into their hands the greater number of cases of spinal curvature fall; assured that if medicinal were entirely to supersede mechanical means, the result, in most cases, would be much more satisfactory. In cases of delayed dentition, the growth of the teeth is promoted, and they are speedily protruded through the gum, under a course of the bone-earth phosphate. It might very probably be administered with success in cases of false joint from un-united fracture of the long bones, and in cases of rickets.'

It will surprise some readers to hear of iron in Ireland, but there, nevertheless, the mineral exists, in the mountains near Lough Allen, and with coal in the same range. The returns have of late been so encouraging, that the works at Arigna and Creevelea are increasing in activity. The ore contains sixty per cent. of iron, and the proprietors are exerting themselves to produce iron from their furnaces which shall equal the best qualities of English. Sir Robert Kane spoke truly when he shewed that the mineral deposits of Ireland had been too long neglected among her industrial resources.-But for long years to come, Cleveland-the north-eastern corner of Yorkshirewill yield more ironstone than any other part of the kingdom. The results there are already astonishing.

Mr Horner is still working at that important geological inquiry—the rate at which the valley of the Nile has been filled up by the annual inundations. The excavations and borings, specimens of which have been regularly forwarded to England, have brought to light some very remarkable facts, which will be made known in Mr Horner's next report. One of his objects is to ascertain whether the French geologists, in their scientific survey of Egypt, were correct in their conclusions as to the age of the alluvial deposits in the valley of the Nile, and the rate of their deposition. Abstruse as this inquiry may seem, it is intimately connected with the questions most interesting to all who think, as will by and by appear.

The Curaçoa has arrived at Woolwich, having on board some ten or twelve tons of mosaics, sculptures, architectural remains, and such like, collected by the Rev. N. Davis, near Tunis, all of which are supposed to be relics of ancient Carthage. More specimens for our museums and schools of art.-The Admiralty have sent out a circular, requiring all commanders on service in the royal navy to make periodical returns of all the merchant-ships they speak at sea; giving the names, port of departure and destination, and the tonnage. These particulars can be communicated by means of four signal-flags, with which British registered vessels are provided, and foreigners may have them by applying at the Board of Trade. By this means the shipping-lists published at our various ports will be much more complete and trustworthy than at present, and every communication from a Queen's ship will increase the number, with benefit to merchants, and often with pleasure to those who have friends on the deep.

The material progress of the nation, as shewn by the reports of trade, is little less than amazing. The number of steamers in course of building at the principal yards in the kingdom is so great, that some of the chief builders have orders three years in advance. Our exports for the month of July amounted to L.12,201,532; in the same month of last year they were L.9,968,226. We find from a recently published blue-book that the total imports in 1856 were valued at L.127,917,561; and the total of exports, L.291,867,388. In the same year, 1855 ships-422,359 tons-were built; and the total number of registered vessels was 36,106, or 5,316,736 tons, employing 267,759 seamen. Since the new reading-room was opened at the British Museum, the number of readers has doubled. The South Kensington Museum continues to attract numerous visitors.-A project is now on foot for a great West-end railway-terminus, which when completed will be five times larger than that of the Great Western at Paddington. The basin of the Grosvenor Canal is to be the site: the canal is to be drained, and four lines of rails are to be laid down to connect all the metropolitan railways north and south of the Thames with the grand terminus. We only hope the scheme will be carried out by honest people.

[blocks in formation]

OF

POPULAR

LITERATURE

Science and Arts.

CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS.

No. 196.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1857.

THE OLD COMMENTATOR. To see the old commentator in situ, we must go back a good way. He is sitting in his high-backed oaken arm-chair; the table before him is a low one, that the pile of books which he is in the habit of placing on it may not absolutely bury him; besides which, he has a fancy for stooping at his work. IIe has an old fur-cap upon his head, and an old fur-coat upon his shoulders. Both are dusty and worn; but both the dust and wearing have something great and venerable about them, like those upon an old well-read classic of the sixteenth century. Ilis brow is brought down far over his eyes by constant study, and his face is full of lines; but they are the lines of toil, not of care or thought. Care he has scarcely known; and he has had too much to do with the thoughts of others, to have much call for thoughts of his own: hence his checks retain their plumpness, and his features and limbs their power and elasticity. His look is fixed and steady, but not bright. The natural good-humour of his mouth has been twisted into a kind of fierce doctorial defiance, arising from the perpetual warfare in which he passes his life. As he looks up from the ponderous old folio, of which he appears to have mastered six pages in as many minutes, he presents to you one of those rude massive magisterial faces which Rembrandt loved to paint, and even Vandyck, that artist of kings and senators, could transfer to canvas, with an energy which he did not always exercise in the case of more dignified personages.

I must confess a peculiar fancy for the works of the old commentator, all the more that he is so utterly gone out of fashion. I am told that his observations on the classics are not what literary slang chooses to call 'critical,' which means, being interpreted, that they did not refer to metrical canons, nor trouble themselves about the niceties of moods and tenses: nor do I, for that matter. So far, we are sympathetic. I am still more sympathetic with the dry old sage in the second reproach brought against him-namely, that he twaddles-that his gossiping meanderings round and about the regions of ancient history and mythology are puerile and inane-that he cannot meet with a sentence about a god or a hero, but he must needs launch out into a lengthy prattle about all sorts of incongruous circumstances pertaining to such god or hero. Whether these things are puerile or inane, whether they are mere gossip or not, detracts not from a peculiar interest that they possess. It is the spirit of one great past age illustrated by the spirit of another. The Greek and Roman are dressed up in the professional cloak and cap of a Dutch scholar of the

PRICE 1d.

sixteenth century. The effect may be somewhat incongruous, but it is at least more piquant than dressing the said Greek and Roman up in the white waistcoat and kerseymere trousers of a modern literary magnate of the university of Cambridge.

Our commentator has just laid down the seventeenth folio, which he has opened within the last hour, and taken up the eighteenth. It is wonderful how the

man matches with his folio. The same massiveness, the same intensity, the same dusty respectability and uncompromising fixity of form; both of them look as if they could never shut when they were once open, and never open when they were once shut. The ancients had their golden, their silver, and their iron age; with still more justice, the moderns might have their folio, their quarto, and their octavo age. The present is eminently an octavo case-octavo in its habits, forms, and fashions. Our successors will very probably be duodecimos. But the old commentator is eminently a folio: he looks as if anything smaller would be crushed under his ponderous fingers-as if it would be lost in the immensity of matter, physical and intellectual, which he is gathering around him.

Our scholar, once seated amongst his folios, looks as if he never could rise again; but he looks round with an unexpected vivacity at the tall stalwart form which has just entered the room. It is a man richly dressed, yet with a sober hue about his somewhat solemn attire. Neither lace nor ruffles appear on his velvet doublet. You look at him, and at the first glance you set him down for a statesman; at the second, for a rich merchant, who had that day been made provost. He places himself at the table, takes up one of the books with the air of a man who is used to them, and proceeds to converse about them with such a strange mixture of the scholar, the gentleman, and the man of commerce, that you are fairly at fault to find out what he is. He is one of those chieftains of the literary class-a publisher of the seventeenth century. He takes up the manuscript on which our commentator has been engaged with the air of a man who knows all about the matter, and is quite as capable of sustaining a contest as to the real nature of the Pyrrhic dance or the Eleusinian mysteries as his learned friend. He has just come from a visit to the pope or the king of France; he has been exhibiting to them specimens of his types, and has talked with them for an hour about the details of the edition which he is about to publish after the labour of our commentator. He has read to them the dedication which he intends to prefix-one addressed to no less a personage than themselves—but in which he has addressed them with perfect freedom, not to say indifference. They

have been jesting with him about the Latinity of his phrases, a point upon which he is extremely tender, and on that account his magnificent patrons make sport with him occasionally. The pope has given him the exclusive privilege of printing his proposed great book, 'under pain of excommunication to all those who shall infringe it.' The sacred arms of the Roman hierarchy have been employed in less noble causes; but, in these degenerate days, we might perhaps smile at the publisher who guarded his copyright by an excommunication. Such, however, were in those days the usual mode of supplying the constitutional guardianship of an act of parliament; and, to say the truth, it was more picturesque, and quite as effectual.

Our visitor has brought him a pamphlet, which he presents to our commentator; the writer of which has treated the said commentator's opinion of the form of the acropolis at Athens as 'the squalling nonsense of some effete baby.' The learned man looks at the book with perfect placidity, talks about it with unconcern, and lays it down; but as soon as his visitor is gone, he instantly seizes his pen, and adds to his notes something in this strain: A certain grunting pig has found fault with what we have here advanced. This intolerable cow, this essence of all that is most asinine in asses, not content with living in his own filth, which so well suits him, thinks proper to bring his messes into our garden. A kick or two will send the brute howling into his own sty.' This same 'brute' is, nevertheless, like himself, one of the great men of the age-a friend of popes and princes-their superior, in his own estimation, and one who has deserved as well of the world, in the opinion of posterity.

This tendency to furiousness of abuse is wonderfully facilitated by the enormous command which learned men of those days had of the language in which they all wrote the Latin. Were vile words wanted, they had them without stopping, like Falstaff, for breath to utter.' The torrents of abuse they could pour out are perfect marvels of Latinity. Their mode of proceeding on this, as on every other occasion, is simply that of a child. The old scholar, in his business matters and in his religious matters, is just as mere a baby as he is in his controversial. In the latter, he scatters epithets as they rush into his mind, just as a child in the nursery would, if it had the same command of language. For his religion, he is pretty sure to have changed it two or three times over, without any reason which would avail with anybody but himself. It is a fact, that of the old scholars more than half changed their religion with perfect indifference, and apparently from mere whim, for they shewed none of a convert's zeal about their new creed, and in very few instances seem to have understood it. The rival opinions of Papist and Protestant are shared out among them with tolerable evenness; and the only evidence any of them shew that they ever thought on the subject, is their proneness to do what every one else is so slow to do-namely, to forsake the creed which they sucked in with their mother's milk. It would seem that their conduct was a mere childish way of proving their independence; and we really believe that, in most instances, it was nothing more.

There is another mania which has taken possession of our commentator, besides that of changing his religion: nothing will serve him but a descent from a crowned head. We remember one of his fraternity, who, not contented with claiming his descent from a sovereign prince of Italy, actually took his name-a whim which, by the way, has alone preserved that of the sovereign prince in the recollection of the world. But for the learned man, no one would ever have heard of the prince. Another declared himself an offshoot of a house which founded the imperial dynasty of Austria, and rivalled the kingly dynasty of France

namely, the House of Burgundy. Nothing less than this will satisfy the ambition of our learned man. Why should it? Nothing less would add to his dignity. He has been accustomed to play the great man so long, that his dreams of greatness extend.

Our learned man, amongst other honours, receives a royal invitation to repair to one of the principal courts in Christendom. The invitation he receives with his wonted sense of his own dignity: he sees nothing extraordinary in the fact that kings or queens should desire to know one of the greatest men on earth. Anybody, he declares, may be a general or minister of state; but it is not given to every one to be a great commentator. If left to himself, he might very probably refuse the invitation. But his wife interferes; she has a woman's ideas about appearing at court, and is resolved to make a figure. After some hesitation whether her husband shall make his appearance in Greek pallium or a Roman toga, she cuts the knot by deciding that he shall exhibit himself in complete armour. By this means, he is the representative of all the old nations of antiquity at once; besides which, he is assuming the right to which his descent from princely lineage entitles him. The limbs, therefore, of the old scholar, stiff with long sitting, are cased in greaves and targets; his venerable head, too, for so many years cognizant of the old fur-cap, is surmounted with a brass helmet, new polished for the occasion. It was in this attire that one of the most awkward and learned of the old scholars actually appeared at the court of Christina of Sweden. If that curious personage had seen in the learned man's whim a satire on her own proceedings with learned men in general, it would have been no more than she deserved. But the learned man is guiltless of satire; nothing could make him conscious that he was playing anything but a dignified part, peculiarly becoming his position and circumstances.

In money-matters, our learned man is a perfect baby. When he first began to teach, many of his scholars, who soon found out the weak side of learning, not only omitted to pay him, but borrowed his money into the bargain, perfectly certain that he would never ask for it again. This went on till the matter became notorious; some one interfered, and the pupils were prohibited from obtaining any further supplies for their follies from this quarter. The professor finding his money accumulate, and not knowing what to do with it, took it to the gaming-table, partly to get rid of the burden, and partly from a vague idea of gaining a philosophical insight into the human character, which would enable him better to understand the Epicurean philosophy, upon which he was then writing a treatise. He got his ideas, but with them so much loss and ill fame, that he was forced to leave the town, where, said one of his admirers, he was worshipped like a god.

The ménage of our commentator is a curious one. Lion as he is amongst his own race, fiercely as he can repel any attack upon his theories respecting the Greek phalanx or his version of a Latin ode, he is a mere house-lamb in his own family. Socrates was not the only sage that had a Xantippe. His learned labours are carried on in the midst of a host of squalling children, whose clatter is not at all improved by the sharp tone of the mother, who is scolding and belabouring them by turns. In the first years of his union, the hapless scholar, who found more than one of his best ideas spoiled by the noise, actually did venture on a mild remonstrance, but it was received in such a manner that he never ventured upon it again. His only resource has been in his notes, wherein he pours out his whole soul to his intimate friend, the reader, to tell the said intimate friend how his lucubrations have in some instances fallen short of the mark, 'because his affectionate child would insist upon playing about his knees.' 'If I had been in his place,' observes a

learned modern upon the note, 'I should have sent young master out of the room. Alas, how little did the modern understand the position of his renowned predecessor!

In a corner of the room are stowed away a mass of letters, of which many men might well be proud, but which our professor looks upon as a mere matter of course, and a simple tribute to his deserts. Half of them are from royal or princely personages, who have just established a new university or remodelled an old one. They write to our professor in Latin; it is a shame they do not write to him in Greek. They-the royal and princely personages-are just as fulsome in their expressions of adulation as their own flatterers; one would think that they were parodying the follies daily addressed to themselves, or that they were poking fun at the learned man. They are doing neither; they are only conforming to the general style, with a secret feeling that the learned man is more necessary to them than they are to the learned man. Princes can adopt just as mean a style as other people, when they have similar reasons for it.

In truth, our commentator cares much more about dead kings and princes than he does about live ones. He lives and breathes with the ancients; he has no other models to admire, no other authorities to quote. No specimens of good histories, of fine poetry, even of accounts of ordinary facts, existed in his day from recent pens. If a farmer talked to him about one of his sheep, his mind would instantly revert to a Greek naturalist; if his wife talked to him about a dinner -there was no Almanach des Gourmands in his daysall that would occur to him would be the feats of some Roman epicure in the devouring days of the first emperors. Who can complain of his taste, if in philosophy or poetry he preferred Plato and Homer to the writings of the schoolmen or the rhyming legends of the monks! All that was worth having, knowing, or thinking about, came from antiquity. The modern scholar has a thousand things of his own day to master: there is, in the first place, the literature of modern times, which now stands in fair competition with those of the ancients; but besides this, there is a vast quantum of science, politics, philosophy, and theology which your modern professor must know, if he would not be the laughing-stock of decent society. All this was quite out of the way of our commentator. Talk to him about politics in his day, and all you would get would be a goodly shower of those epithets of ass, cow, swine, hedgehog,' of which he had so vast a profusion in his linguistic quiver. Modern science, to him, was made up of the freaks and follies of the alchemists-no wonder he preferred Aristotle.

He was once told that the remains of Petronius were to be found entire at Bologna. Petronius was a Latin author whom he especially admired: the old scholar had something of a hankering after loose morality. The idea of finding the entire works of an old author hitherto found only in part, put him instantly in a fever; it was one of those prizes which are rarely drawn in the literary lottery. He scarcely stayed to pack up his clothes, and journeyed day and night in winter, from the north of Germany to Bologna, where was the treasure in question. On his arrival, his first demand is if the remains of Petronius are not to be found in the city? Certainly: they are the glory of the place. Go to the sacristan of the church of St John.' He goes, and requests to be shewn the remains of Petronius. The sacristan takes him into the vault. 'What!' says the scholar, 'do you keep your manuscripts in the vault?' 'I don't know what manuscripts mean,' replies the sacristan; but here lies the body of St Petronius, our guardian saint.'

Homer says that it would take nine men of his degenerate day to lift a stone thrown by a single warrior of the heroic ages. We know not how many

men of our own time it would take to equal the labour of our commentator-certainly not less than a dozen. In truth, his were the heroic days of literature. See how the pile of manuscript grows under his indefatigable fingers! If he has sat at work less than sixteen hours in the twenty-four, he considers, like Titus, that he has lost a day. Fits,' says Bernard Lintot in Pope's squib against Dennis-'a man may well have fits and swollen legs who sits writing fourteen hours a day.' Alas! the degenerate days had already set in; in the time of Bernard Lintot, our commentator sat writing for sixteen hours, for six months in succession, without having fits or swollen legs. There was a time when he allowed himself only one night's rest out of three. He was warm with youth in those days, and found that he had gone too far: there are stones too heavy even for Homeric heroes. No wonder that piles of folios grow up out of his labours. No wonder that authors in those days did not print in duodecimo. Why, a single work would have required a long travel to get from one end to the other of the series; and as for the entire works of our author, it would only have been possible to reach the last volumes on horseback.

The humour of the learned man would be just as antique and dusty as everything else about him. If he goes to supper, and gets lively, he will pour out Greek epigrams by the dozen; and on going home, he will exhort his feet, in an extempore Latin distich, to keep steady under him. He has often stopped in the middle of his lecture to cook an ancient dish, by way of illustrating the meaning of his author. If he meditates a gay book, as some relief to his heavier labour, he writes the lives of the ancient cooks, illustrated by an essay on the action of the stomach on the mind, and a dissertation on the Epicurean philosophy.

Such were a race of beings more completely passed away than the high-priest of Baal in the Nineveh marbles. The last has perhaps a representative in some of the far corners of the globe; but the learned man of the sixteenth century has no representative upon the face of the earth. He has left his works as memorials of his existence, which hand him down to posterity by their weight, if by nothing else-ponderous folios, that once startled society, but are now selling for waste paper from the groaning shelves of the booksellers. If he does meet with the classical poets and historians in the Elysian fields, how he will wrangle with them over the construction of their sentences! A meeting of the commentator and his author in the next world will certainly be a curious one. We will let this transient glimpse of the old worthy pass from us, hoping that the earth lies more lightly upon him than his own works upon it.

THE MOUNTAIN IN THE MAIN. Our in the Arctic Sea, somewhat more than 400 miles to the north-east of Iceland, there rises, apparently projected by volcanic agency, the mountain-island of Jan Mayen. It shoots straight up out of the sea to the height of nearly 7000 feet, having from certain points of view the appearance of a peak, not unlike the enormous spire of a church. As seen from a distance, it seems impossible to land upon it, yet, on approaching nearer, there is found to be a narrow line of coast, and several small harbours, which offer a tolerable anchorage when the state of the surrounding ice admits of entrance. The island was originally discovered by Captain Fotherby, who stumbled upon it through a fog in the year 1614. Sailing southward in a mist so thick that he could not see to the length of his ship, he suddenly heard the noise of waters as if breaking on a great shore, and getting a glimpse shortly afterwards of the gigantic bases of Mount Beerenberg, which is the name given to the eminence, he thought he had discovered some new continent.

Since then, it has been frequently sighted by homeward-bound whalers, though, on account of its ordinary inaccessibility, it has rarely been landed upon. Once, however, shortly after its discovery, an attempt was made to inhabit it, that was attended by tragic consequences; the particulars of which, till recently, have been very little known.*

About the year 1635, the Dutch government, wishing to establish a settlement in the actual neighbourhood of the fishing-grounds, where the blubber might be boiled down, and the spoils of each season transported home in the smallest bulk, prevailed on seven seamen to remain the whole winter on the island. Huts were built for them, and they were liberally supplied with salt provisions, and there left to resolve the problem as to whether or not human beings could support the severities of the climate. Standing on the shore, these seven men saw their comrades' parting sails sink down beneath the sun; then watched the sun sink as had sunk the sails; and as the long arctic night set in, must have felt themselves left to a perilous and questionable fate. As is the manner of seamen, they kept a log or diary of their proceedings, noting down from day to day what seemed most worthy or desirable to be recorded. The 26th of August,' they wrote, 'our fleet set sail for Holland with a strong north-east wind and a hollow sea, which continued all that night. The 28th, the wind the same; it began to snow very hard; we then shared half a pound of tobacco betwixt us, which was to be our allowance for a week. Towards evening, we went about together, to see whether we could discover anything worth our observation, but met with nothing.' To the like effect is their experience for many a weary day-cold dreary days of sleet and storm, which differ little one day from another.

On the 8th of September, they were frightened by a noise of something falling to the ground'-probably some volcanic disturbance, or descent of a loosened glacier. A month later, it becomes so cold that their linen, after a moment's exposure to the air, is frozen like a board. Huge fleets of ice beleaguered the island, the sun disappears, and they spend most of their time in rehearsing to one another the adventures that had befallen them by sea and land.' Ere long, this resource of story-telling fails, or the relation becomes bald by repetition. On the 12th of December, they have the fortune to kill a bear, having by this time begun to feel the effects of a salt diet. Slowly, drearily, the time goes by, and every day most weary seems the sea'

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.

At last comes New-year's Day, 1636. After having wished each other a happy new year, and success in our enterprise, we went to prayers,' say they, 'to disburden our hearts before God.' They had yet two months to wait before the reappearance of the sun. It was some slight relief to the prolonged dulness when, on the 25th of February, they once more saw him rise. But now to dulness and the pains of cold succeed sickness and debility. By the 22d of March, they were suffering from the scourge of scurvy: For want of refreshments we began to be very heartless, and so afflicted that our legs are scarce able to bear us.' Alone on that dismal rock, they were 'out of humanity's reach;' slowly, miserably perishing, and in conscious dread of perishing, before help could come. On the 3d of April, there being no more than two of them in health, they killed for the others the only two pullets they had left; the sick men feeding 'pretty heartily upon them, in hopes it might prove a means to recover part of their strength.' 'We were sorry,' says the record, we had not a dozen more for their sake.' On Easter-day, Adrian Carman, of Schiedam, their clerk,

Letters from High Latitudes.

6

dies. The Lord have mercy upon his soul, and upon us all, we being very sick,' is the entry on this sad occasion. During the next few days, they seem all to have got rapidly worse, only one being strong enough to move about. He had learned writing from his comrades since coming to the island, and it is he who concludes the melancholy story. The 23d (April), the wind blew from the same corner, with small rain. We were by this time reduced to a very deplorable state, there being none of them all, except myself, that were able to help themselves, much less one another, so that the whole burden lay upon my shoulders; and I perform my duty as well as I am able, as long as God pleases to give me strength. I am just now a going to help our commander out of his cabin, at his request, because he imagined by this change to ease his pain, he then struggling with death.' For seven days this gallant fellow goes on 'striving to do his duty'-attending on his helpless comrades till they were all past help, and making entries in the journal as to the state of the weather, that being the principal object they were charged with when left upon the island; but on the 30th of April his strength too gave way, and his failing hand could do no more than trace an incompleted sentence on the page.

So, sinking one after another, the forlorn band had all fallen. As the season advanced, however, ships were getting ready; and on the 4th of June, up again above the horizon rose the sails of the Zealand fleet; but when search is made for those who it was hoped would have been found alive and well, lo! each lies dead in his own hut; one with an open prayer-book by his side; another with his hand stretched out towards the ointment he had used for his stiffened joints; and the last survivor with the unfinished journal still lying by his side.

Since this grim tragedy, Jan Mayen has had no inhabitants. Mount Beerenberg raises his head with an awful majesty above the storms, but looks down on voyaging adventurers who pass his borders with too inhospitable a frown to induce them to tarry long within his presence. Nevertheless, the island has been occasionally visited by enterprising navigators, some of whom appear to have explored it more completely than its early Dutch discoverers. Twenty-two years ago, the late Dr Scoresby effected a landing there, on his return from a whaling cruise. He had seen the mountain a hundred miles off, and, on approaching, found the coast quite free from ice; and, by a subsequent survey, ascertained that the island is about sixteen miles long by four wide. last and most complete account of this singular seamountain is given us by Lord Dufferin, who went in search of it in his yacht, in the summer of 1856. The particulars are given in his recently published voyage-narrative, entitled Letters from High Latitudes; from which very interesting work we select such passages as may serve to complete the picture of Jan Mayen, and to shew the difficulties and dangers of approaching it.

The

Lord Dufferin sailed from Iceland in his schooneryacht, the Foam, a little vessel of about eighty tons burden, being accompanied in his expedition by a French steamer of 1100 tons, the Reine Hortense, on board of which was his Imperial Highness Prince Napoleon. The prince suggested that the Reine Hortense should take the Foam in tow; and in this way upwards of 300 miles of the voyage to Jan Mayen was performed. At this point, however, the French vessel, falling short of coal, was obliged to return, leaving Lord Dufferin, who was unwilling to go back, to buffet his way forward amidst fog and ice, as well as the skill and hardihood of himself and crew, and the sailing powers of his little schooner, might enable him. 'I confess,' says he, 'our situation, too, was not altogether without causing me a little anxiety. We had not seen

« AnteriorContinuar »