THE NORTH POLE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IV, Issue 3, 1 December 1883, Page 2

THE NORTH POLE.

♦ , Another iaypi]ite; illusion (says f he Pall Mall Gazette) has received itß death blow. Arctic exploration, eyen When' most successful, ia but a gathering of Dead Sea apples. The northwest passage is discovered only m order fco demonstrate itej useJessness-, the myth of an open Polar Sea, with a circumpolar pontiuent inhabited by happy men wh.p Uye behind the rfbrt]). wind, Ims vanished iptotfcin &\v ', aiid now Profesr sor Nordenjold announces ,,' that bJs successful expedition' into the interior of Greenland finally dissipates the hope he has so long entertained of discoveiing oases of fertile land behind the ice belt on the coast. '.'iQver the. wliole inland there is ice." Greenland. is , no green land, as the explorer had hoped to find it, but m very truth a .desolate wilderness of eternal ice. it must have been a melancholy task for the famous traveller to destroy his own hypothesis, and instead of achieving one of the triumphs of scientific prediction, to register his pw»; mistake, but that is the ; fate, more ox less, of all arctic explorers. Even the .North Pole, when it is reached at last, will probably add but one more item to the long list of the disappointments which have awaited all travellers m the frozen seas.